Importance: 10%
The Big Idea
Christopher Alexander flips the idea of feeling and art around. Rather than an artist expressing feeling in art rather the geometry of the whole works back toward humans to create feeling. This means the source of feeling in the build environment is objective in the objects themselves coming back to humans and so being guided by this kind of feeling means that it is an objective human reaction to the built environment and the imagination of what a particular action could do to enhance or hurt that feeling. - deep feeling
This is not normal touchy feely emotion but is a sense of how a space works on or affects the person who encounters it. This puts the direction of causation in the external environment to the person and so he argues is an objective realty rather than the inside out idea of emotions. He conceptualized this human reaction to a space’s “life” as a kind of objective steady reaction across cultures and individuals. See: The Quality of Life in Environments and Objects. Which I think can be helpful as far as it goes but as a community of faith our primary grounding is the word of God.
The mirror of the self test is fascinating in that he claims it is a way to access a deeper liking than opinions or cultural ideals. But he goes super eastern here when he talks about being part of an “original mind” that we are trying to get ourselves more in line with
I think from a Christian perspective the idea of image of God is a better alternative in that we do not seek to find things that reflect the wholeness of ourselves or some vague cosmic entity but rather we can in a small way use the broken pieces of our image bearing to feel what is in line with God.
As I think about this more it feels like what we are really after is a honing and learning in our conscience. What we truly deeply “like” should be the things that are inline with the core realty of the universe which is that God created and ordered it. So the things with the most life that are the best reflection of my image bearing are the things that pull us closer to an understanding and experience of God and His good order
Further article: Wholeness and Feeling in Structure-Enhancing Transformations