Importance: 10%
The Big Idea
The feeling of life in a space, object or human event that makes us feel at ease and able to be ourselves
Quote
The quality I call life in these buildings exists as a quality. It is clearly not the same as the biological life we recognize in organisms. It is a larger idea, and a more general one. Indeed, what we intuitively feel as “life” in these objects happens just as much in a purely abstract thing like a painting as it does in a functioning thing like a building.
- Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander, bk 1, p. 45
The whole goal of this concept of life in ordinary things is that life is richer and healthier the more life is created and encourages around us.
My favorite example he uses is that his house is better and more beautiful with ducks outside because the life they add is valuable. There is a sense then that we are in some way connected and contingent on this quality of life around us. In an environment that is constructed and devoid of life we cannot truly thrive as humans
It seems to me that there are two ways to take this idea. One is to depart and dive into a the whole idea of Eastern religion where we are one with the universe and the universe is one with us. This is not helpful for Christians because this is not anything Scripture teaches
Where it can be helpful and a second way to take it is that as co creators and tenders of the earth it makes sense that the life we are charged to tend is not just our bodies or animals but God called us in the The Two Commissions to care for all creation and part of that is promoting and creating this quality of life in our built environment as well as the way we interact with nature.
The way to actually access the presence of life according to Alexander is through listening to the raw emotional reaction of the people who live and use an environment. This is because humans have an innate sense of if things are rightly ordered but we often get in the way of that with bureaucratic rules or abstractions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V4QYC-PRIw
Notes on the Nature of Order TODO: gather notes on Alexander’s approach to feeling.