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To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

Christopher Alexander

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Christopher Alexander
Age: 88
Born: 1936
Born: October 4
Architect
Architectural Theoretician
University Teacher
Vienna
Austria
Christopher Wolfgang Alexander
Christopher W. Alexander
Without
Seek
Objective
First
Building
Root
Must
Name
Wilderness
Way
Names
Central
Criterion
Men
Quality
Objectives
Criteria
Life
Spirit
Town
Timeless
Cannot
Towns
Named
Firsts
Roots
Precise

More quotes by Christopher Alexander

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In my life as an architect, I found that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low.
Christopher Alexander
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Most of the wonderful places in the world were not made by architects but by the people.
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People are deeply nourished by the process of creating wholeness.
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To work our way towards a shared language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life.
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One begins to think with that new building block, rather than with littler pieces. And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.
Christopher Alexander
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It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.
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The more living patterns there are in a place - a room, a building, or a town - the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.
Christopher Alexander
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From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as sentences.
Christopher Alexander
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Nowadays, the process of growth and development almost never seems to manage to create this subtle balance between the importance of the individual parts, and the coherence of the environment as a whole. One or the other always dominates.
Christopher Alexander
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Everyone is aware that most of the built environment today lacks a natural order, an order which presents itself very strongly in places that were built centuries ago
Christopher Alexander
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The buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to us.
Christopher Alexander
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There are geologists who can pick up a rock and say, 'Yes, there's oil under there.' A geologist who has been studying those kinds of rocks for 10 or 20 years is able to make that pronouncement.
Christopher Alexander
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In an organic environment, every place is unique, and the different places also cooperate, with no parts left over, to create a global whole - a whole which can be identified by everyone who is part of it.
Christopher Alexander
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All matter/space has some degree of self in it, and this self, or anyway some aspect of the personal, is something which infuses all matter/space and everything we know as matter but now think to be mechanical.
Christopher Alexander
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There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.
Christopher Alexander
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Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there.
Christopher Alexander
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Once you understand this way, you will be able to make your room alive you will be able to design a house together with your family a garden for your children places where you can work beautiful terraces where you can sit and dream.
Christopher Alexander
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I believe that all centers that appear in space - whether they originate in biology, in physical forces, in pure geometry, in color - are alike simply in that they all animate space. It is this animated space that has its functional effect upon the world, that determines the way things work, that governs the presence of harmony and life.
Christopher Alexander
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Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality. Buildings were judged more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.
Christopher Alexander
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All space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it, and matter/space is more alive or less alive according to its structure and arrangement.
Christopher Alexander