concept
active
concept:nested-centersNested centers
Centers that contain or are contained by other centers, forming the hierarchical structure of wholeness.
Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count
Concepts (1)
concept
- Wholenessassociated_withAlexander's core concept rejecting the idea that a whole consists of parts; instead, a whole makes its parts (called 'centers').
Chapters (1)
chapter
- Wholeness And The Theory Of CentersintroducesThe chapter that introduces the fundamental concepts of wholeness and centers, laying the groundwork for understanding life in buildings.
Related by similarity (8)
cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edgeEntities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.
- Alexander's quasi-mathematical definition of wholeness as a recursively nested system of living centers displaying local symmetries, approximating the overall gestalt of a configuration
- 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.
- The property that living structures contain centers that are not merely blobs but strong, field-like centers that organize the space around them; every strong center is made of many other strong centers recursively
- The overall configuration of interrelated centers that constitutes a whole.
- Configurational entities existing implicitly in a structure; guide perception and generation of next morphogenetic step; exemplified in St Mark's square cycles.
- The recursive composition principle, key to understanding wholeness.
- The recursive process by which centers generate life through mutual intensification, where each center's life depends on the life of others.
- Question posed after describing the plenum, answered by the window metaphor.