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question:are-the-present-rules-of-the-game-likely-to-help-people-generate-a-living-structure-in-the-larger-whole

Are the present rules of the game likely to help people generate a living structure in the larger whole?

Central evaluative question that challenges contemporary architectural and planning practices.

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

Claims (1)

claim

A living process is any adaptive process which generates living structure, step by step, through structure-preserving transformations.
gates
Core definition that anchors the whole chapter; asserts the necessary and sufficient structure of life-creating activity in the built world.

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 creation of living structure cannot be done in any other way.claim0.782
Traditional patterns generated living structure because they were based on fitness of the whole; 20th-century profit-oriented patterns damaged living structure because they optimized for profit, not wholenessclaim0.775
Contrast drawn to motivate the need for a new generation of life-supporting patterns
In order to create living structure, we must please ourselves.claim0.772
The central thesis of the chapter: pleasing yourself is the necessary and sufficient prescription for creating living structure.
Such a process will not—in general—create living structure.claim0.768
To learn how to create living structure in buildings, we had better start by looking at nature.quote0.767
Alexander's programmatic statement linking his natural philosophy to his architectural agenda
To have living modern architecture, society must have a process capable of generating building form dynamically, step by step, at all scales.claim0.765
The need for a new kind of process in society.
In nature the principle of unfolding wholeness creates living structure nearly all the time. Human designers, who are not constrained by this unfolding, can violate the wholeness if they wish to, and can therefore create non-living structure as often as they choose.quote0.765
Encapsulates the distinction between natural and human-made order, central to Alexander's critique of contemporary architecture.
Does this formal creation of geometry really apply to other living processes? Does it apply to the formation of a community? Does it apply to the creation of a human group; does it apply to the brushwork of a delicate painting? Or to the construction of a song played by a flute?question0.764
The open question that the chapter leaves for future investigation across multiple domains