Wood as Living Presence

The quality Alexander sought in heavy timber construction after recognizing that stud construction produces 'a bunch of sticks with planes strung between them' lacking deep feeling.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Concepts (3)

concept

living structure
associated_with
A built or natural form that possesses life, arising from morphogenetic adaptation, as opposed to blueprint designs.
Japanese Temple Heavy Timber Construction
cites
Historical precedent alongside Norwegian stave churches for achieving living presence in wood through three-dimensional substance.
Old Norwegian Stave Churches and Storehouses
cites
Historical precedents Alexander studied to understand what it means for wood to be worked as three-dimensional substance with living presence.

Questions (1)

question

What would it mean to make something out of wood where the substance of the wood itself had feeling, and a living field of centers appeared in the very wood itself?
gates
Alexander's phenomenological question that motivated the shift to heavy timber construction.

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.

personal things and human presenceconcept0.773
Objects that show human use and adaptation, such as the zone behind the bed, making a space more alive.
Is a forest alive (as a whole, and over and above the life of the component species taken as individuals)?question0.769
Pushes the boundaries of what counts as a living system.
Presenceconcept0.762
The 'something' that exists in living things, which is the I; an actual, personal quality in matter itself.
The creation of living structure cannot be done in any other way.claim0.751
Living structure might even be defined as 'that which pleases us'—that which truly pleases us.claim0.746
A proposed operational definition of living structure in terms of genuine pleasure.
There is nothing except the living structure of the world, and this living structure is all we need to reason with.claim0.741
Radical assertion that function reduces to living structure, eliminating the need for external goals.
What materials and building techniques are needed for construction of buildings in a living world?question0.737
The framing question of the entire chapter.
There is only one I, a personal universal presence that underlies all living structure and manifests as the feeling of relatedness.claim0.736
Alexander's core metaphysical proposal introduced in §8.