It
has taken me almost fifty years to understand fully that there is a
necessary connection between God and architecture, and that this
connection is, in part, empirically verifiable. Further, I have come to
the view that the sacredness of the physical world—and the potential of
the physical world for sacredness—provides a powerful and surprising
path towards understanding the existence of God, whatever God may be, as
a necessary part of the reality of the universe. If we approach certain
empirical questions about architecture in a proper manner, we will come
to see God.
It comes from realizing
that the task of making and remaking the Earth—that which we sometimes
call architecture—is at the core of any commonsense understanding of the
divine.
Only in the last twenty years has my
understanding of this connection taken a definite form, and it continues
to develop every day. It has led me to experience explicit visions of
God, and to understand, in some very small measure, what kind of entity
God may be. It has also given me a way of talking about the divine in
concrete, physical terms that everybody can understand.
There
can be little doubt that the idea of God, as brought forth from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has slowly become tired . . . to
such an extent that it has difficulty fitting into everyday
twenty-first-century discourse. As it stands, it is almost embarrassing
to many people, in many walks of life. The question is: Can we find a
way to mobilize, afresh, the force of what was once called God, as a way
of helping us to recreate the beauty of the Earth?
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| Alexander's Eishin Campus outside of Tokyo. |
The
view put forth here does not leave our contemporary, physical view of
the universe untouched. Indeed, it hints at a conception which must
utterly transform our conception of ourselves and our place in the
universe. It shows us, in a new fashion, a glimpse of a beauty and
majesty in the smallest details of human existence.
All
this comes from the work of paying attention to the Earth, its land and
rocks and trees, its buildings, the people and ants and birds and
creatures all together, and the blades of grass. It comes from realizing
that the task of making and remaking the Earth—that which we sometimes
call architecture—is at the core of any commonsense understanding of the
divine.
In 1956, I began for the first time,
consciously, to try to find out what architecture is. I had received a
degree in mathematics, at Trinity College, Cambridge, and, as I had
always intended, began a second degree, this time in architecture, also
at Trinity. As I took in what I was being taught, I felt that the
then-prevailing idea of architecture was rootless and arbitrary, mainly
governed by styles and pointless quirks of style, and that what
architects typically said about it was peculiar, often meaningless and
egocentric. In 1958, as early as I could after completing my
architecture degree, I left to go to the United States, to do a Ph.D. in
architecture at Harvard. That was the moment when I first got my feet
on the ground, and began trying to define the nature of architecture
from first principles.
To have something solid that I
could be sure of, I started by examining the smallest particles of
functional effect that I could discern in buildings, paying attention to
small and sometimes barely significant aspects of the ways that
buildings affect people. My purpose in doing this was to focus on the
smallest particles of
fact that I could be certain of: something
that was extraordinarily difficult given the porridge of mush that then
passed for architectural theory. In those early years, my studies were
based on the most ordinary, miniscule observations about usefulness and
the effect of buildings on the people who lived in them, always keeping
the observations modest, reliable, and detail —small enough and solid
enough that I could be sure that they were true.
At
first I included very small particulars of functional effect of any kind
that made a practical difference to daily life . . . a shelf beside the
door where one could put a packet down while searching for one’s keys,
for instance, or the possibility of a sunbeam coming into a room and
falling on the floor.
I soon realized that some of
these details were very much more significant than others. Those like
the first (the shelf) tended to be pedestrian, even though useful; while
those like the second (the sunbeam) were more uplifting, and clearly
mattered more in some obvious but profound sense. They had a greater
impact on people’s mental and emotional health. And they had more to do
with beauty. So I began to focus on those miniscule points that mattered
more, in the sense of the second example. Gradually, then, I was able
to see how buildings support human well-being—not so much mechanical or
material well-being, but rather the emotional well-being that makes a
person feel comfortable in himself. And as I studied these small effects
carefully, gradually I was led to a conception of the wholeness and
wellness that might, under ideal circumstances, arise between buildings
and human beings.
Starting with these humble and
detailed pictures of what seemed to matter in a building, for fifty
years I have struggled to provide a basis for architecture that can
sustain human feeling and the human spirit. I made an effort to
penetrate the logic of architecture, and the logic of architectural
value, in the hope that I could alter the devastating effect on human
beings and on human society of what had become known as “modern”
architecture. I hoped to replace this faceless thing with an idea and
practice of architecture that would help us sustain the sanctity of
life, both in our hearts and in society.
During my
years as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, I
encountered considerable resistance from the faculty and administration.
Even though the religious content of my work was certainly not
articulated in those early years, my colleagues in the department of
architecture made continuous efforts to diminish the importance of my
work, and did their best to dissuade students from taking my classes.
The spiritual content and underlying message of my approach, though
always presented in a form acceptable to common sense, struck them
(rightfully) as an attack on the prevailing forms of thought and
practice in fashionable twentieth-century architecture.
I
could not knuckle under. To protect my ability to teach and to protect
my students, I was obliged during the period of 1985 to 1992 to
undertake a First Amendment lawsuit against the university, since the
university was undermining my right to teach what I believed to be true.
I was by then a full professor in the department, and my work was in
large part
empirical, but it took seven long years before I
prevailed in my right to teach the approach I had formulated, and was
able publicly to go ahead with research and further reasoning that
seemed empirically adequate to me.
During all these
years I still had not formulated an explicit way of understanding the
connection between God and architecture, nor had I found it necessary to
do so. But half-consciously, it was always at the heart of what I was
doing. Questions about the nature of God, the relation between God and
our concepts of modern physics, the apparent disparities between the
various views of God presented in different cultures and religions, were
with me every day. For one or two decades, I also immersed myself in
various forms of practice—Zen Buddhism, psychotherapy, private forms of
meditation—to do what I could to sharpen and clear my mind. As a
practicing Roman Catholic, I learned much from Christian mystics
(especially
The Cloud of Unknowing); Sufi saints (Mevlana, Ibn Arabi); Buddhist and Taoist writers (Chuang Tzu and Lao Tse, especially the
Tao Te Ching);
Zen poets (especially Bashō); south sea anthropologists Gregory
Bateson, Ruth Benedict, and Jane Resture; the Sanskrit classical canon;
Western writers such as the French psychiatrist Hubert Benoit; Aldous
Huxley; and the Enlightenment (especially Spinoza).
As
time went on, I also began formulating practical and modest theories,
which enabled me (and others) to build better buildings. Some of my
works became widely read, and translated into many languages. These
theories were focused on the search for a deeper sense of well-being—not
thermal comfort or energy saving, but a deeper psychological and
emotional comfort, in which people could feel their own existence as
human beings. These theories gradually became widely accepted, but also
continued to raise discomfort in the profession. They plainly were at
odds with the stark and ego-centered view of buildings that was then
being taught by most teachers of architecture, and that was commonly
accepted in late-twentieth-century society as the “correct” view.
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| The Sustainable Institute of the Sustainable Valley of Hurdal, Akershus, Norway. Stark and ego-centeric; utterly at odds with the findings of Christopher Alexander and a sustainable architecture for our future! |
As
a result of struggling to understand these things at a deeper level,
while establishing a foundation that seemed ordinary and practical, I
found it more and more difficult to fit together a well-defined
scientific or intellectual model of what was going on in a way that
could encompass these simple matters. And yet it was also clear to me
that the empirical reality of these simple matters could not be denied,
and certainly could not be abandoned.
In the period
from 1979 to 1990, I found to my surprise that I was gradually forced to
wrestle with questions about the nature of reality, of space, of value,
and of human freedom. As I moved forward, the need to clarify these
issues became more and more apparent. I also found that within the
positivistic, scientific canon I had grown up with while studying at
Cambridge, it was virtually impossible even to formulate adequate
concepts that would be capable of solving the more profound issues that
lie at the root of architecture.
Up until that time, I
had accepted the academic, positivistic, scientific philosophy and
practice of my youth. I had been trained in physics and mathematics,
and assumed, virtually as part of my educational birthright, that these
scientific disciplines could be relied on, and that I should not step
outside the intellectual framework that they provided. But to solve the
practical and conceptual problems in architecture, I now embarked on a
study of a series of concepts that, though formulated more or less
within scientific norms, nevertheless opened ways of thinking that were
highly challenging to the academic establishment:
• Wholeness
• Value, as an objective concept
• Unfolding wholeness
• Connection with the inner self
• Centers
• Structure-preserving transformations
• Degrees of life
I
introduced these concepts and a few others only because I found them
essential to the task of thinking clearly about the life of buildings.
Yet they were almost undefinable within the terms of contemporary
scientific thinking. This was true to such a degree that even raising
these topics as matters for discussion in professional architectural
circles caused raised eyebrows, obstructive reactions, and little
sincere effort to get to the bottom of the issues.
One
by one, then, I allowed these new concepts into my everyday way of
thinking, doing my best to hold to scientific rigor and clarity, yet
trying to formulate models that would adequately portray the needed
concepts in a way that made sense of them.
In this view, architecture contributes to the world to just that extent to which it plays its role in this tapestry, and that, in turn, comes about as a result of the extent to which a building, or an outdoor place between buildings, or a doorway, is composed entirely of entities that are themselves whole and entire, and which—each one of them—make us feel whole and entire. This is, in any case, an attempt to make a picture of the whole.
During
1978–1985, I went as far as I was able in laying the groundwork of a new
model. One might say that this new model relied heavily on new forms of
experiment, in which a person would attempt to judge the quality of an
action, building, painting, or place by consulting his own self as to
the degree of wholeness that appeared in the items under discussion or
investigation.
This was the beginning of a very new way
of thinking about architecture, which viewed the environment and its
structure as an instrument interacting with human beings in such a way
that people could heal themselves. In short, it was the beginning of a
practical theory of healing environments—still far from the subject of
God—but now perhaps beginning, subtly, to point in that direction.
My coworkers and I put forward this theory in a number of books, of which the most important was probably
A Pattern Language, which has (I am told) become the best-selling architecture book of all time. Companion volumes included
The Timeless Way of Building;
A New Theory of Urban Design;
The Production of Houses;
The Linz Café; and
The Oregon Experiment,
all published between 1975 and 1987. These six books laid out a theory
with which people could produce well-functioning environments for
themselves.
 |
| A Pattern Language, which has (I am told) become the best-selling architecture book of all time. |
As my colleagues and I continued
experiments in which we did our best to apply these principles to real
building projects, it became more and more clear that we needed to
sharpen our idea of health and clarify the target of this work. It was
urgent to develop a more solid conceptual and experimental foundation
that could provide us with practical ways of judging which environments,
and which kinds of environments, were indeed most successful in
sustaining or promoting health.
This task began to
lead, for the first time, to empirical hints of the presence of God. In
effect, we began to discover a new kind of empirical complex in
buildings and works of art that is connected with the human self,
spirituality, social and mental health, God, ways of understanding the
role that love plays in establishing wholeness, the role of art, and
conscious awareness of the human being as part of some greater
spiritual entity. These arguments were later conveyed in the four books
of
The Nature of Order.
I would like to
summarize our work by explaining this new kind of empirical complex in
the following way. In any part of what we call nature, or any part of a
building, we see, at many levels of scale, coherent entities or centers,
nested in each other, and overlapping each other. These coherent
entities all have, in varying degree, some quality of “life.”
For
any given center, this quality of life comes about as a result of
cooperation between the other living centers at several scales, which
surround it, contain it, and appear within it. The degree of life any
one center has depends directly on the degrees of life that appear in
its associated centers at these different scales. In short, the life of
any given entity depends on the extent to which that entity had
unfolded from its own previous wholeness, and from the wholeness of its
surroundings.
 |
| Living centers at several scales. -Wikimedia. |
When one contemplates this phenomenon
soberly, it is hard to imagine how it comes about. But what is happening
is, in effect, that life appears, twinkling, in each entity, and the
cooperation of these twinkling entities creates further life. You may
view this phenomenon as ordinary. Or you may think of it as the
Buddhists of the Hua-Yen canon did, when they viewed it as the
constantly changing God-like tapestry that is God, and from which life
comes.
In this view, architecture contributes to the
world to just that extent to which it plays its role in this tapestry,
and that, in turn, comes about as a result of the extent to which a
building, or an outdoor place between buildings, or a doorway, is
composed entirely of entities that are themselves whole and entire, and
which—each one of them—make us feel whole and entire. This is, in any
case, an attempt to make a picture of the whole.
With this, with a searchlight focused on the whole, I could no longer really avoid the topic of God.
I
suppose it is fair to say that there are two approaches to the reality
of God. One is faith; the other is reason. Faith works easily when it is
present, but it is luck, or one’s early history in family life, or a
blinding insight of some kind, that determines whether one has faith.
Reason is much harder. One cannot easily approach the reality of God by
means of reason. Yet in twentieth- and twenty-first-century discourse,
reason is almost the only way we have of explaining a difficult thing so
that another can participate.
It is reason—the
language of science, and its appeal to shareable, empirical observation
and reasoning—that has given our modern era its strength. Yet one is
unlikely to encounter God on the basis of reason. There can, however, be
a persuasive logic that deals with the whole, and with the deeply
enigmatic problems that the concept of the whole opens.
My
life began with childlike faith. After then going through the dark
forests of positivistic science, to which I gladly gave myself for so
many years, I was finally able, through contemplation of the whole, to
emerge into the light of day with a view of things that is both
visionary and empirical.
It is a view that has roots in
faith, and from it builds bridges of scientific coherence towards a new
kind of visionary faith rooted in scientific understanding. This new
kind of faith and understanding is based on a new form of observation.
It depends for its success on our belief (as human beings) that our
feelings are legitimate. Indeed, my experiments have shown that in the
form I have cast them, feelings are more legitimate and reliable,
perhaps, than many kinds of experimental procedure.
It
is in this way that I was led from architecture to the intellectual
knowledge of God. It was my love of architecture and building from which
I slowly formed an edifice of thought that shows us the existence of
God as a necessary, real phenomenon as surely as we have previously
known the world as made of space and matter.
During my
years at Berkeley, I never taught or spoke about God explicitly as part
of my work as an architect. As professor of architecture, I tried to
teach and write in ways that were consistent with my background in
science and mathematics. It would have seemed incongruous to bring God
into my discussions of architecture because I was simply trying to find
out what was true and write it down. A fairly straightforward process, I
thought, following well-tested methods of scientific inquiry. So that
is what I set out to do, and that is what I did. In my heart, I was
always dimly aware that I did maintain an inner knowing that the best
way to produce good architecture must somehow be linked to God—indeed,
that valuable architecture was always about God, and that this was the
source of any strength I had in being able to identify the real thing.
But in the early days these stirrings were very much private, interior
to me, and subdued.
You see, then, how it is that the
careful study of architecture led me—and I believe would inevitably lead
any careful and empirical thinker—to thoughts about the nature of
things, and the simultaneous existence of what we may call the objective
(outer) nature of things, typically dealt with in science, and at the
same time of what we may call the subjective (or inner) nature of
things.
Earth—our physical Earth and its
inhabitants—sand, water, rocks, birds, animals, and trees—this is the
garden in which we live. We must choose to be gardeners. We must choose
to make the garden beautiful. Understanding this will give us
intellectual insight into the nature of God, and also give us faith in
God as something immense yet also as something modest, something which
lies under the surface of all matter, and which comes to life and shines
forth when we treat the garden properly.
What is new is the discovery that the
so-called subjective, or inner, view of things is no less objective than
the objective or mechanical view of things. When questions about the
subjective are asked carefully, and in the right way, they are as
reliable as the experiments of physics. This understanding has led to a
new view of experiment that uses the human being as a measuring
instrument and leads to reliable, shared results when properly done.
This
has all come to light because of my intense interest in and focus on
architecture. In conventional philosophy, there is nothing that allows
one to test the reality of God, or of visions inspired by God. But we
ask people to compare two buildings, or two doorways, and to decide
which one is closer to God, different people will answer this question
in the same way, and with a remarkably high reliability.
All
this has a unique ability to point to the reality of God. In theory,
other disciplines such as ethics might seem to have more claim to
illuminate discussion of God. But the tangible substance of
architecture, the fact that in good architecture, every tiny piece is
(by definition) suffused with God, either more or less, gives the
concept of God a meaning essentially translated from the beauty of what
may be seen in such a place, and so allows it to disclose God with
unique clarity. Successful architecture ultimately leads us to see God
and to know God. If we pay attention to the beauty of those places that
are suffused with God in each part, then we can conceive of God in a
down-to-earth way. This follows from an awareness in our hearts, and
from our active effort to make things that help make the Earth
beautiful.
This is not a pastiche of pseudo-religious
phrasing. In technical language, it is the structure-preserving or
wholeness-extending transformation (described in
The Nature of Order
and capable of being precisely defined) that shows us how to modify a
given place in such a way as to give it more life. When applied
repeatedly, this kind of transformation is what brings life to the
Earth, in any place.
Earth—our physical Earth and its
inhabitants—sand, water, rocks, birds, animals, and trees—this is the
garden in which we live. We must choose to be gardeners. We must choose
to make the garden beautiful. Understanding this will give us
intellectual insight into the nature of God, and also give us faith in
God as something immense yet also as something modest, something which
lies under the surface of all matter, and which comes to life and shines
forth when we treat the garden properly.
 |
| We must choose to be gardeners. -Flickr. |
The most
urgent, and I think the most inspiring, way we can think about our
buildings is to recognize that each small action we take in placing a
step, or planting a flower, or shaping a front door of a building is a
form of worship—an action in which we give ourselves up, and lay what we
have in our hearts at the door of that fiery furnace within all things,
which we may call God.
We will only see God in the
world around us if the quality of the architecture is right—an almost
unattainable condition in today’s world. Why is it almost impossible?
Because in an epoch when God was not acknowledged, it became virtually
impossible for people to build the kinds of buildings where God appears.
The whole purpose of the work I have done is to show that the presence
of God in a matter-configuration is an objectively existing condition,
and that there are specific paths and methods and habits of thought
through which we may create buildings where the presence of God can be
seen and felt.
 |
| God is hard to find in Hurdal Ecovillage. -Wikimedia. |
The two go hand in hand.
We
cannot make an architecture of life if it is not made to reflect God—an
objective condition. And, by a surprising twist, the search for a true
architecture, that is to say, a real architecture that works, and in
which this feeling of rightness is present in every bone, in an
irreligious era has the unique power to bring back the reality of God to
center stage in our concerns.
 |
| The faith of my great grandfather is reflected in his "stabbur". -Wikimedia. |
My work has proven this
to me: There is available to us a form of transformation that, each time
it is applied, extends and enhances the wholeness of the land, whether
rural or urban. The act of transformation also puts us in touch with
ourselves by making the land of the Earth become more and more deeply
connected to our selves. An environment, when made in this way, may even
be regarded as a vision of our inner selves.
The best
state for the land—our best actions on the land, in the land, and in the
buildings—will come from our awareness of its wholeness and from our
awareness of its connection with our own selves—that is to say, with
God, the substrate of the universe that is the origin of who and what we
are.
As I have said, grasping the wholeness,
awakening our ability to see it and to adhere to it—these are all
profound and often difficult. In order to understand these operations
from a practical and mathematical point of view, we need to be guided by
an inner voice, and I believe that voice is tantamount to a vision of
God. Thus, although it is formless and shapeless, nevertheless it is
this vision of God that draws us on.
That new vision
can become a new source of inspiration and motivation. I call it new not
because it is at root genuinely new. Of course it is not—it is ancient.
But it is entirely new in our era to take such a thing with full
seriousness, and to be able to derive from it well-fashioned,
scientifically endowed conceptions of what is needed to heal a given
place. It will not be governed by money or profit; it will not be
governed by social politics; it will be governed simply by the desire
and firm intention to make beauty (which is to say, true life) around
us.
 |
It will be governed simply by the desire
and firm intention to make beauty (which is to say, true life) around
us. -Wikimedia.
|
Perhaps that sounds as though it is not solid
enough for sober and enlightened action. Quite the opposite is true. The
vision of God we hold in our inner eye, which we draw from the hills
and mountains, from the cities, towers, and bridges, from the great oak
trees, and the small and tender arbors, from the stones and tiles that
have been carefully laid, it is that which is God, and which we
encounter as we try to find a vision of God in the world. It guides us,
as if with a certain hand, towards a future which is yet more beautiful.
 |
| The
vision of God we hold in our inner eye, which we draw from the hills
and mountains... -Wikimedia. |
The capacity to make each brick, each path, each
baluster, each windowsill a reflection of God lies in the heart of every
man and every woman. It is stark in its simplicity. A world so shaped
will lead us back to a sense of right and wrong and a feeling of
well-being. This vision of the world—a real, solid physical world—will
restore a vision of God. Future generations will be grateful to us if we
do this work properly.
Taking architecture seriously
leads us to the proper treatment of tiny details, to an understanding
of the unfolding whole, and to an understanding—mystical in part—of the
entity that underpins that wholeness. The path of architecture thus
leads inexorably towards a renewed understanding of God. This is an
understanding true within the canon of every religion, not connected
with any one religion in particular, something which therefore moves us
beyond the secularism and strife that has torn the world for more than a
thousand years.
Christopher Alexander is emeritus
professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and
the author of A Pattern Language; The Nature of Order, Volumes I-IV;
and The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth.
