The Public Square: a Phenomenology of Wholeness

I just found the following article that caught my attention. As a critic it shows that Alexander was not very successful in applying what he understood, I would need to look into that myself but the exploration he is into seems to me perfectly valid. The following two paragraphs particularly call my attention:

"[U]nion of system behavior with the subjective experience of the observer is

fundamental to what I have to say, fundamental to the idea of wholeness as

something not merely present in an objective material system but also

present in the judgment, feeling and experience of the observer….[We need]

observations of a type which can only be obtained when we agree to use the

observer’s feeling of his or her own wholeness, as a measuring instrument.

Yet subjective as it sounds to our mechanistic ears, this is nonetheless

objective. It opens the door to a new standard of observation, and a new

methodology of measurement. In architecture… where my observations

have been careful and extended over several decades, I can say positively

that valid and profound results and findings cannot be reached without

meeting this condition (2003, p. 13).

Phenomenology can be defined as an intuitive, qualitative science that readily

accepts individual and group feeling, intuition, and experience as a valid subject of

study and as a means for studying the thing of interest—in this case, wholeness,

beauty, and life."

What I understand he is saying is that what is perceived depends on the level of being of the individual looking and we completely agree on that but what I think he is also after is the fact that no matter the level of being of the individual, architecture has an objective effect on people. That "objective" effect is what I tend to call the logos. An architecture that touches upon the self of the individual and enhances the experience of unity. It is not the same to be in a greek temple, a gothic cathedral or a mall and yet they can all convey wholeness or disintegration. If we look at our cities today, the disintegration is not only in the architecture but in the transportation system with one person driving around the little car, choking our selves and the planet while at it and paying a full price for the privilege. The lack of wholeness is expressed in the lack of dignity of the conditions and that is clear when we move from the rich parts of town to the low income neighborhoods. Ironically, there is more sense of "community" in the lower income areas than in the high income ones because to keep the imaginary picture of themselves and justify their status, the people in high income places have to do so by separating themselves from the rest and stating their superiority through class, national, education or other status. What they gain from living in privileged environments physically is wasted in their inner experience of the whole of humanity. That is in general terms the . The tendency is that in every echelon of society, those above will ignore and have a superiority act from those below, which simply shows how upside down and backwards is the "instinctive" society.

[Paper presented for a special session on Christopher Alexander, annual meeting of the

Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), Sacramento, CA, May 2007]

http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/Alexander%20as%20phenomenology%20of%20wholeness%20dec%2008.pdf

Christopher Alexander and a Phenomenology of Wholeness

David Seamon

Architecture Department

Kansas State University, 211 Seaton Hall

Manhattan, KS 66506

triad@ksu.edu

www.arch/ksu/edu/seamon/

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Christopher Alexander's contribution to a phenomenology of

wholeness, by which is meant finding conceptual and practical ways for

understanding how things belong together so that they can indeed belong, whether

one speaks of the parts of a well made building, the steps in an effective construction

process, or the elements of a helpful theory. Throughout his professional efforts,

Alexander has sought to delineate a theory of wholeness that might generate a making

of wholeness, which in turn might offer further insight into a theory of wholeness. His

work demonstrates how an inspired reciprocity between thinking and making might

lead to deeper understandings and more livable places.

Introduction

“Within myself I have always been aware of a single, unbroken whole in what I do.”

—Christopher Alexander (Grabow 1983, p. ix)

As far as I know, Christopher Alexander has never described his work as

phenomenological, yet I would argue that his efforts, point of view, and discoveries

readily relate to a phenomenological perspective and method (1). For example, his

work to create a “pattern language” can fairly be described as an implicit

phenomenology of designable situations contributing to a sense of place, just as his

four-volume The Nature of Order (NO) can be interpreted as a phenomenology of a

particular kind of order that Alexander calls wholeness, which, whether in nature or

humanmade, is the “source of the coherence which exists in any part of the world”

(NO, vol. 1, p. 90). Wholeness, he says, is integrally related to other lived qualities

like beauty, eloquence, good health, well being and—most integrally—vitality and

life.

A central aim in Alexander’s work is to understand how the parts of a made thing—

whether a handsome carpet or a gracious building or an animated urban district—

belong together and have their proper place in the whole (Alexander 1975, 1979,

1981, 1985, 1987, 1993, 1995, 2003, 2002-05, 2007). He also asks how wholeness,

whether as understanding or making, comes into being and how an ever-deepening

reciprocity between understanding and making might allow for more and more

wholeness to unfold. Perhaps most strikingly, Alexander has pursued a quest for

wholeness throughout his entire professional career: “Within myself I have always

been aware of a single, unbroken whole in what I do,” he reported to biographer and

commentator Stephen Grabow (1983, p. ix).

In this presentation, I focus on Alexander's contribution to a phenomenology of

wholeness, by which I mean finding conceptual and practical ways for understanding

how things belong together so that they can indeed belong, whether one speaks of the

parts of a well made building, the steps in an effective construction process, or the

elements of a helpful theory. Throughout his professional efforts, Alexander has

sought to delineate a theory of wholeness that might generate a making of wholeness,

which in turn might offer further insight into a theory of wholeness. His work

demonstrates how an inspired reciprocity between thinking and making might lead to

deeper understandings and more livable places.

A Phenomenology of Wholeness

To specify what a phenomenology of wholeness might entail, I turn to the insightful

hermeneutic-phenomenological work of physicist Henri Bortoft (1996; also 1971,

1985; Stefanovic 1991, 2000), who argues that the whole cannot be explained

through some sequential, analytical approach that breaks the whole into a set of parts

and then reassembles them piecemeal by cerebral effort as might, for example, a

systems approach to ecology. Instead, the whole can only be understood by entering

further into its parts through a mode of careful, intuitive encounter uniting perception,

feeling, and thinking. In other words, there is a way to see how the whole is present

throughout its parts, so that, in any one of the parts, the whole can be found,

sometimes more clearly, sometimes less. As one finds ways to better understand the

parts, so the whole to which they belong becomes better defined; in turn, this

progressive clarity of the whole sheds additional light on the parts, which become yet

more understandable and say more about the whole. There is a process of reciprocal

insight—a virtuous circle resonating between parts and whole.

The great difficulty, however, is finding a way to move into and encounter the parts

as they are in themselves so that the whole will be foreshadowed and seen, more and

more fully. How do we encounter the parts most advantageously so that we can better

see and understand the whole? How can one avoid describing the parts in an

unfaithful way or arbitrarily constructing a counterfeit whole unfaithful to the parts?

In this sense, any act of understanding or doing is revealing the right parts in their

right relationship as they mark out the larger whole. Bortoft explains:

If a part is to be an arena in which the whole can be present, it cannot be any

old thing. Parts are not bits and pieces, because a part is only a part if it is such

that it can bear the whole. There is a useful ambivalence here: “to bear,” in the

sense of “to pass through” and “to carry”; and “to bear” in the sense of “to

suffer,” where this is taken in the sense of “to undergo.” By itself the part is

nothing, not even a part, but the whole cannot be whole without the part. The

part becomes significant itself through becoming a bearer of the whole

(Bortoft 1971, p. 54).

Alexander’s Shifting Efforts toward a Phenomenology of Wholeness

Bortoft's discussion of parts and whole has bearing on Alexander's work because,

throughout, he has sought ways to understand and make the whole through attempting

to identify, gather, and intensify right parts. At different times in his professional

career, Alexander has applied different labels to the wholeness he seeks

—“the quality without a name,” “the timeless way of building,” “creating pattern

languages,” “density,” “degrees of life,” “fundamental properties sustaining

wholeness,” or “wholeness-extending transformations.”

In his “pattern language” period, which Grabow (1983, p. 109) identifies by the

period 1967 to 1973, Alexander and his colleagues sought the right parts by gathering

examples of buildings and places throughout the world that evoke a sense of order,

robustness, and comfort; then identifying and explicating underlying physical

qualities, or patterns, that might be drawn on to conceive future buildings and places.

Significantly, these patterns are not things but constellations of

environment/experience relationships potentially sustaining, through the physical

world, a sense of human and environmental well being. As Grabow explains, this

“pattern language” phase centered on the “discovery that the sense of being

completely alive has a clear phenomenological counterpart in space—a particular

quality of space that one can actually see as well as feel” (Grabow 1983, pp. 66-67).

Pattern language is a significant effort to understand environmental wholeness

because, first, it provides a compilation of time-tested environmental possibilities,

envisioned and arranged from larger to smaller scale, that contribute to a place

exuberance; second, the approach provides a programmatic means for explicating

new patterns as needed and integrating them with existing patterns to concretize new

pattern languages for buildings, places, and situations not imagined in the original

language of 253 patterns.

Making and Life-Evoking Geometry

From Bortoft’s perspective, pattern language is most successful in that, through the

process of identifying and organizing patterns into a larger structure of belonging, the

designer and client move toward a clear design vision grounded in makeable qualities

and relationships sustaining a strong environmental ambience. Beginning about 1973,

however, Alexander began to realize that the pattern-language process alone offered

little help in transforming a particular design vision into actual construction and

wholesome places.

According to Grabow (1983, p. 128), one impetus for this recognition was his Center

for Environmental Structure’s pattern-language design for a mental health clinic in

Modesto, California, which, when actually built by a construction firm using

conventional building methods, ended up seeming little different from standard

modernist architecture. About this time, too, Alexander realized that other designers

and builders, using the pattern language, were producing buildings that had the same

“mechanical, death-like morphology” of other current architecture (ibid.).

This failure of pattern language to produce buildings of beauty and grace led

Alexander to recognize that he must incorporate an understanding of process into his

theory of wholeness. As he reported to Grabow (ibid., p. 137), people who make

things typically do not understand “the extent to which what is done or what happens

is a product of the processes that are governing events behind the scenes.”

Though his eventual explication of the making process is wide-ranging and includes

such dimensions as politics, economics (including the capital cost of building and the

mortgage process by which it is financed), ontology, and even metaphysics, he

ultimately gives most attention to two major topics: first, the identification of life-

evoking geometrical properties that might provide a link between the original pattern

language and its physical manifestation; second, the process of construction,

especially identifying a way of building by which each step of design and

construction flows from preceding steps and points toward the next step in the

construction process.

From one perspective, Alexander’s four-volume The Nature of Order can be

understood as his effort to incorporate life-evoking geometry and step-by-step

construction into a process of making that sustains environmental and place well

being. To deal with the matter of geometry, he identifies a set of fifteen geometric

properties (table 1) that he claims recur in all things, buildings, places, and

situations sustaining wholeness and life. To deal with the matter of step-by-step

design and construction, he develops a method of making whereby each step in the

process becomes a pointer for what is to come next through the recognition, guided

in part by the fifteen principles, of creating more and more centeredness, density,

order, and life. His means toward this end is ten structure-enhancing actions that he

claims potentially intensify the life and wholeness of the thing made (table 2 and

figure 1).

Table 1

Alexander’s 15 properties of wholeness

• Levels of scale

• Strong centers

• Boundaries

• Alternating repetition

• Positive space

• Good shape

• Local symmetries

• Deep interlock &

ambiguity

• Contrast

• Gradients

• Roughness

• Echoes

• The void

• Simplicity & inner

calm

• Not separateness

Table 2

Alexander’s 10 structure-enhancing actions

1. Step-by-step adaptation.

2. Each step helping to

enhance the whole.

3. Always making centers.

4. Allowing steps to unfold

in the most fitting order.

5. Creating uniqueness

everywhere.

6. Working to understand

needs of clients & users.

7. Evoking & being guided by a

deep feeling of whole.

8. Finding coherent geometric

order.

9. Establishing a form language

that rises from & shapes

thing being made.

10. Always striving for simplicity

by which thing becomes

more coherent & pure.

Figure 1

making as an activity of creating life:

Alexander’s Nature of Orderas a process

stuff & situation from which made thing arises

fifteen

geometric

properties

ten structure-

enhancing

actions of

maker (&

clients)

life-giving order & wholeness

Nature of Order as a Phenomenology of Wholeness

In the last part of this paper, I want to suggest one way that a phenomenological

critique of The Nature of Order might proceed by giving attention to Alexander’s

fifteen geometric properties that he argues are present wherever there is manifested a

sense of wholeness and life. Alexander claims that, however they are expressed in

the particular instance, this wholeness and life are “a real, well-defined structure,

not merely a cognitive impression” (Alexander 2003, p. 7). More so, he argues that

this sense of life is present not only in living things but potentially present

anywhere in anything where the situation manifests a certain geometric presence—

specifically the fifteen geometric properties. He explains:

[A]ll space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it

[sic], and that matter/space is more alive or less alive according to its

structure and arrangement (NO, vol. 1, p. 4).

[The key idea] “is that what grows and unfolds, grows and unfolds as a

natural consequence of what is, because it literally grows out of the

wholeness—a structure in space— … a structure of symmetries that exist in

the way that a given portion of space is differentiated (NO¸ vol. 4, p. 321).

If, as Alexander is claiming here, the degree of life present in a situation is

equivalent to that situation’s degree of geometric structure (and vice versa) then the

fifteen properties, phenomenologically, should have some sort of direct transposition

into human life—in other words, they should in some way reflect and sustain the

human lifeworld—i.e., the individual’s or group’s everyday world of taken-for-

grantedness that is not normally made an object of conscious attention.

When one examines the fifteen properties with a phenomenological eye, one notes

that some can be directly related to phenomenological aspects of the lifeworld—

perhaps most directly, the property of “not-separateness, which, in Alexander’s

presentation, involves each part of a situation, place, or made thing melting “into its

neighbors” (ibid., vol. 1, p. 233). From a phenomenological perspective, not-

separateness can readily be transposed into the central phenomenological principle

that human beings and their worlds are never separate; rather human being is always

human-being-in-the-world (see Seamon 2000; 2006, 2007; Stefanovic 2000).

One also notes that there are other geometric properties that can be connected to

related phenomenological principles, thus centers can be reinterpreted existentially

through the phenomenological claim that human lived-space is never uniform but

charged with locales and places—particularly the home place—that orient

individuals and groups spatially and gather their intentions environmentally.

Similarly, “gradients” has a parallel existentially with the experienced fact that one’s

lived space ranges in lived meanings from place to place and locale to locale, just as

“boundaries” can be interpreted as lived indications of such experiences as

enclosure, separation, connection, or penetration.

On the other hand, properties such as “roughness,” “echoes,” “the void,” and

“simplicity and inner calm” are less readily rephrased as lifeworld qualities. One

might argue that roughness relates to the always tentative and unfinished nature of

everyday life and experience, or that the void has relation to the existential need for

some degree of privacy and inner quiet, but this kind of parallel construction seems

arbitrary and forced. My larger point is that the fifteen properties vary in their range

of clarity and transposition when pondered in terms of equivalent lifeworld

expression. Yet if these properties are integral to the degree of life in a particular

region of space, then logically one would expect that each encompasses and evokes

quite specifically a particular range of lifeworld situations and experiences. But not

all do.

My hunch is that not all the fifteen properties do because, ironically, they may be too

much piecemeal and localist rather than holistic and global. In applying the fifteen

qualities to making, Alexander emphasizes that, ultimately, the most important is

“strong centers,” which he defines as any sort of spatial concentration or organized

focus or place of more intense pattern or activity—for example, an attractive

window, a well placed kiosk, an elegant arcade, a welcoming building, or an entire

city neighborhood that is well liked and cared for (see especially NO, vol. 1, chap.

3). A major weakness with this emphasis on centers, however, may be the fact that

a center, both geometrically and existentially, involves a quality of focused

intensity that, in its conception and effects, is more piecemeal and local than

whole-linked and global.

Centers and Global Integration

One way to clarify this concern about “strong centers” is to turn to architectural

theorist Bill Hillier’s space syntax, an environment-behavior theory demonstrating

that the people/space relationship, whether for buildings, neighborhoods, or

complete settlements, must be understood both locally and globally (Hillier 1996,

2005; Hillier & Hanson 1984; Seamon 2004, 2006, 2007). For Hillier, the central

local structure is what he calls convex space—the quality of local space that relates

it to its immediate surroundings. On the other hand, the central global structure is

axial space—the quality of a local space as it is integrally interconnected with the

much larger pathway fabric of which it is part. Axial space has crucial significance

for Alexander’s theory of wholeness because it relates to a place’s global pattern—

that is, the way the particular spatial configuration of the place’s pathway fabric

lays out a potential field of movement that draws people together or keeps them

apart.

Though Alexander briefly discusses the differences between Hillier’s two types of

space in volume 1 of The Nature of Order, he does not seem to realize that his

fifteen properties are largely local in their interpretation of wholeness (3). For sure,

“levels of scale,” “interlock,” and “gradients” speak partially to the way a center

relates to other centers larger and smaller, but it also can be said that these

properties interpret this interconnectedness mostly in terms of parts rather than in

terms of configuration and topological relationships and interconnections. Hillier

would be critical of Alexander’s understanding of the whole because, at least at the

scale of places and human environments, their global wholeness is reduced to local

parts, since there is no awareness of the integrative power of pathways (4).

In short, I worry that, in Alexander’s explication of wholeness, the underlying

degree of configurational links, global interconnectedness (what Hillier refers to as

relative “integration”) is left largely out of sight. In his discussion of art works,

decorative objects, and buildings as static architecture, this emphasis on the local

qualities of wholeness provides powerful insights because these things are more or

less independent physical entities that do not house human lifeworlds. On the other

hand, the fifteen properties may cast an incomplete understanding when one

attempts to apply them to the larger-scale environmental fabric of buildings and

places around and within which the lifeworlds of real human beings actually

unfold. This may be a reason why the fifteen properties do not all readily transpose

themselves into lifeworld structures, situations, and events.

Bortoft’s Reaction to The Nature of Order

Finally, let me ask how Henri Bortoft might react to Alexander’s presentation of

wholeness in The Nature of Order. Bortoft emphasizes that a part is only a part if it

serves a clearly defined whole, and this requirement of precise specificity may touch

upon another potential weakness of Nature of Order—that, the whole Alexander is

attempting to understand is so broad and all-encompassing that the parts are too

various and vague, thus evoking less conceptual and practical power than they might

if directed toward more specific aims and ends. Exploring the wholeness of a carpet

or art work, for example, might require a different point of view and language than

what might work for buildings and places as lifeworlds.

It is not really clear whether Alexander’s fifteen structural properties have the power

to facilitate, at such a broad range of material and lived scale, the clear sense of

relationship and interconnectedness offered by the earlier pattern language; nor is it

clear that the ten structure-enhancing actions have the practicality or resilience to

really move the making process in such a way that it evolves toward the life-giving

order and wholeness that Alexander cherishes. In short, Bortoft might say that The

Nature of Order involves an unfocused whole, the parts of which attempt to bear too

much.

I don’t mean to suggest by this criticism that Bortoft would find Alexander’s efforts

ineffective or beside the point. Rather, I suspect he would conclude that the more

useful guides for success are Alexander’s many more specific conceptual and

applied efforts at understanding and making wholeness—for example, his studies of

the geometry of early-Turkish carpets (Alexander 1993); his attempt to develop a

wholeness-based theory of urban design (Alexander 987); his experiments in self-

help design and construction systems (Alexander et al. 1985); his efforts to involve

clients and users in the design and building process (Alexander 2003-05, vol. 3).

There is also evidence of success in the built work that Alexander presents in

volume 3 of Nature of Order. Though some of the projects, especially the houses,

seem awkward, roughly constructed, and second rate, other projects evoke the

sense of clarity, dignity, and life for which Alexander strives. One strong example

is England’s West Dean Visitor’s Centre, a building that, both inside and out,

appears to be striking architecture, expressing a serene stateliness shaped by

careful site placement, a simple, majestic form, and handsomely integrated stone,

brick, and concrete. These and other built projects presented in The Nature of

Order demonstrate that Alexander’s approach to making can have effective,

practical results and is feasible for a wide range of situations, clients, and building

types.

Ultimately, Alexander’s efforts in Nature of Order may be most significant

because they help us to “have the taste” for a particular kind of seeing and making

process, which, if we could really absorb and make part of ourselves, would open

us to both the possibility and reality of a vital, sustaining world. Alexander

believes that, if we are to really know and shape our human life in a better way, we

must find a radically new means of looking, understanding, and making. The

Nature of Order demonstrates the remarkable progress he has made toward this

arduous and nearly impossible aim.

Notes

1. Most simply, phenomenology can be defined as the careful description and

interpretation of human experience. The focus is on phenomena—i.e., things or

experiences as people experience those things or experiences. The aim is to

describe any phenomenon in its own terms—in other words, as it is as an

experience, situation, or event in the real lives of real human beings in real times

and places. The goal is not idiosyncratic explication, however, but the

identification of underlying lived structures common to many specific experienced

instances of the phenomenon. See Seamon 2000, 2007a & b.

Though Alexander has not linked his work with phenomenology, biographer and

commentator Stephen Grabow emphasizes that the heart of Alexander’s vision is

“the discovery that the sense of being completely alive has a clear

phenomenological counterpart in space—a particular quality in space that one can

actually see as well as feel” (pp. 66-67; 115-16). One of the most useful roles that a

phenomenological perspective and language could offer Alexander relates to his

efforts to deal with what he calls “values” (as distinct from the so-called “facts” of

analytical science) and the “subjective” nature of human feeling. Alexander writes:

[U]nion of system behavior with the subjective experience of the observer is