"Five hundred years is a long time, and I don't expect that many of the people I interview will be known in the year 2500. Alexander may be an exception."
     -David Creelman, Author, Interviewer, and Editor HR magazine, Toronto

Christopher Alexander's series of groundbreaking books - including A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building - have pointed to fundamental truths of the way we build, revealing what gives life and beauty and true functionality to our buildings and towns. Now, in The Nature of Order, Alexander explores the properties of life itself, highlighting a set of well-defined structures present in all order - and in all life - from micro-organisms and mountain ranges to good houses and vibrant communities.

In The Phenomenon of Life, the first volume in this four volume masterwork, Alexander proposes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life and sets this understanding of order as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. With this view as a foundation, we can ask precise questions about what must be done to create more life in our world - whether in a room... a humble doorknob... a neighborhood... or even in a vast region.

He introduces the concept of living structure, basing it upon his theories of centers and of wholeness, and defines the fifteen properties from which, according to his observations, all wholeness is built. Alexander argues that living structure is at once both personal and structural.

Taken as a whole the four books create a sweeping new conception of the nature of things which is both objective and structural (hence part of science) - and also personal (in that it shows how and why things have the power to touch the human heart). A step has been taken, through which these two domains - the domain of geometrical structure and the feeling it creates - kept separate during four centuries of scientific thought from 1600 to 2000, have finally been united.

The four volumes can be read separately, independently, and in any order. However, it is together that they have their greatest impact as each one informs and illuminates the others.

Here, then, the culmination of decades of intense thinking by one of the most innovative architects alive.

"In the past century, architecture has always been a minor science - if it has been a science at all. Present day architects who want to be scientific, try to incorporate the ideas of physics, psychology, anthropology in their work . . . in the hope of keeping in tune with the "scientific" times.

"I believe we are on the threshold of a new era, when this relation between architecture and the physical sciences may be reversed - when the proper understanding of the deep questions of space, as they are embodied in architecture will play a revolutionary role in the way we see the world and will do for the world view of the 21st and 22nd centuries, what physics did for the 19th and 20th."
-Christopher Alexander