A Search for Beauty/A Struggle with Complexity: Christopher Alexander

Richard Gabriel,Jenny Quillien

doi:10.3390/urbansci3020064

Abstract

Beauty. Christopher Alexander’s prolific journey in building, writing, and teaching was fueled by a relentless search for Beauty and its meaning. While all around him the world was intent on figuring out how to simplify, Alexander came to embrace complexity as the only path to his goal. The Beauty and life of that which he encountered and appreciated—an Indian village, a city, a subway network, an old Turkish carpet, or a campus—lay in its well-ordered complexity. As a designer and maker he found that simplicity came from choosing—at every step—the simplest way to add the necessary complexity. The failure of so much of our modern world, in Alexander’s eyes, was oversimplification, wantonly bulldozing context, misunderstanding the relationships of part and whole, ignoring the required role of time in the shaping of shapes, and ultimately dismissing, like Esau, our birthright of Value in favor of a lentil pottage of mere Fact. Ever elusive, Beauty demands of her suitors a constant return of attention to see what might be newly revealed, and Alexander duly returned again and again in pursuit of the mystery. In this essay—essentially biographical and descriptive of one man’s endeavors—we examine the full arc of his work from dissertation to most recent memoir. We don’t shy away from his failures, and we don’t simplify his journey. We leave work done by other scholars for another day. We reach no conclusion, rather, we invite readers to reflect on what Alexander’s lifelong effort suggests to them about their own path, their own sense of aesthetics and order, innate cognitive shortfalls, and professional blind alleys.

Highlights

Christopher Alexander wished for himself a career in the fine arts, with its concomitant obsession with beauty and keen observation
Paternal pressure was for something more ‘serious’—such as mathematics with its concomitant devotion to precision and veracity. His education consisted of an advanced degree in mathematics from Trinity College at Cambridge sandwiched between a BA (Trinity) and PhD (Harvard) in Architecture [1]
Précis: As a young man, Christopher Alexander’s initial conception of Beauty revolves around appropriateness or ‘a just rightness of fit.’. Complexity, he believes, can be partially tamed with set theory. As this first decade of work harvests new insights, Beauty becomes an emergent property of organized complex systems and Alexander deepens his appreciation of overlap, ambiguity, and multiplicity of meaning

Summary

Introduction

Christopher Alexander wished for himself a career in the fine arts, with its concomitant obsession with beauty and keen observation. Paternal pressure was for something more ‘serious’—such as mathematics with its concomitant devotion to precision and veracity His education consisted of an advanced degree in mathematics from Trinity College at Cambridge sandwiched between a BA (Trinity) and PhD (Harvard) in Architecture [1]. In the far more difficult middle range, we have (c) organized complexity which entails nonlinear, non-random interactions of variables, dynamic unfolding, and emergent properties. Understandings of negentropy, creative acts in art, poetry, music, architecture, and the functioning of natural cities—all of these have their home in organized complexity. Tools to understand such systems include modeling and simulation

Intellectual History

The Crux

Findings

Evocative Art or Mathematical Precision?