concept
active
concept:life-in-things

Life in Things

The quality Alexander attributes to structures with deep wholeness and field of centers; connected to personal feeling

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Concepts (3)

concept
  • Wholeness
    associated_with
    Alexander's core concept rejecting the idea that a whole consists of parts; instead, a whole makes its parts (called 'centers').
  • A singular, non-emotional feeling that arises from experiencing the wholeness; distinct from emotions. It is the experiential grasp of the whole.
  • Person-stuff
    associated_with
    Alexander's term for the personal substrate underlying matter; living structure awakens person-stuff in matter

Related by similarity (8)

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.

  • The experienced presence of aliveness, wholeness, and connectedness in built form, beyond biological life.
  • The quality that makes a building or place alive, beautiful, and supportive of human life; argued to arise from the wholeness of centers.
  • The quality of having profound wholeness, which makes us feel our own existence most deeply.
  • Load-bearing ontological statement condensing Alexander's thesis about the personal nature of life
  • The felt quality of wholeness and adaptation that makes a place truly sustainable and nourishing.
  • The leading question of section 9, probing the nature of the inner life perceived in buildings and art.
  • The quality that makes a space or structure feel alive, whole, and wonderful; measured by the degree of wholeness.
  • The idea that life is not merely an attribute of living organisms but an attribute of space itself; any spatial system can have more or less life depending on the life of its component centers and their density