Jewel Building

The concept that a public building should be a vital center inserted into public space to animate it, like a jewel.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

concept

Centers
associated_with
Primary entities of wholeness that arise from configurations and are activated in space; they have different levels of strength or coherence and are intensified by relationships with other centers.
Mountain View Civic Center
associated_with
Unbuilt project in Mountain View, California, illustrating the differentiation of a building as a jewel in the street.

chapter

Chapter 4: How Differently A Living Process Generates Large Public Buildings
mentions
The working unit chapter that presents Alexander's method for generating large public buildings through living process, illustrated by six major projects.

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

Above all, then, a building is an ornament.claim0.711
Radical claim that the highest function of a building is to be an ornament in the profound sense.
Gray (buildings)concept0.709
The color representing buildings, houses, and businesses in the four-fold pattern, with dark gray for workplaces and light gray for dwellings.
The whole building is an ornament, not something that has ornament added to it.claim0.703
A fundamental redefinition of ornament: the entire building, in its microstructure, is an ornament.
Life (in buildings)concept0.701
The quality that makes a building or place alive, beautiful, and supportive of human life; argued to arise from the wholeness of centers.
Building Volumeconcept0.699
The three-dimensional mass of the building, to be established as a primitive rectangle in response to the centers in public space.
Life (in buildings and artifacts)concept0.697
The experienced presence of aliveness, wholeness, and connectedness in built form, beyond biological life.
The building as a whole is virtually pure art.claim0.695
Claim that the pattern of solid and void, the creation of centers, is pure art, not a mixture of practical and art.
Each building enlivens and intensifies the land.claim0.689
The land—its valleys, ridges, trees, paths—are improved, made more solid, given a more living structure by a well-placed building.