The next concern is to establish how these essential concerns of architecture, building, designing and planning interact with our established forms of knowledge and practice. Christopher Alexander believes that when we design and build, we are contending deeply with highly complex processes. Through increased consciousness of this enacted intelligence, we can understand complexity better: “Architecture presents a new kind
of insight into complexity because it is one of the human endeavours where we most explicitly deal with complexity and have to create it – not typical in physics or biology, at least not yet.” (Alexander, 2003, p. 3) The correspondence to planning is clear enough. Planners must also both engage with complexity and generate it. By understanding these dynamics in architecture, we can profitably shape, engage with and utilize these insights in computer science, organizational theory,
institutional design, planning and other human endeavours. The core of Alexander’s distillation for approaching these seven challenges comes in the form of his fifteen transformations or principles (Alexander, 2003, p. 22). He calls them principles, transformations, and glues of wholeness at different points in his work. They are a set of identifiable points or clusters that draw out something important in each case.
ALEXANDER’S FIFTEEN TRANSFORMATIONS
On initially encountering his work, the reader may discover that Alexander can seem messy, vague, imprecise, confusing, and paradoxical. He is all of these things at different points owing to the exploratory nature of his project. However, it would be selling him far short to equate these impressions with the ramblings of a muddled thinker. Alexander is messy because he is confronting a reality that does not behave. Rather than choose only the elements that are at least
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reasonably controllable and then limiting his reflections to those time-slices or mental boundary spaces, he takes on the mess and remains engaged in it. His big idea is to articulate, through both reflection and practice, a new calculus for design and building that is underwritten by complexity in a tangible, active, scientific and deeply human way. He approaches theory not as an activity detached from tangible experience but believes that the worlds of ideas and of built things
inform each other directly and with significant sophistication, a sophistication that we have only just begun to grasp. Alexander builds both to enact what he thinks and to learn about how the process can teach him about the spaces he orders, the materiality, humanity and variability of trying to make sense of the bits and atoms along with the sentient inhabitants of the world. Here is a brief summary of his fifteen transformations (Alexander, 2003, pp. 5–22):
Wholeness and Value as a necessary part of any complex system. An intuitive model of wholeness as a recursive structure. A mathematical model of wholeness identifying wholeness as a well-defined recursive structure of a new type. Objective measures of coherence in complex systems, and the unavoidable relationship between structure, fact, and beauty. Fifteen geometric properties [transformations] as necessary and inevitable geometric features of reality in any complex system. A meeting point between cognition and objective reality? A new, experimental way of determining degree of coherence, degree of life, and relative value. The science of complexity must make room for subjectivity, not in the sense of idiosyncrasy of judgement, but as a connection to the human being. Local symmetries and sub-symmetries. Deep adaptation as a central concept in complex system theory and in architecture. The absolute necessity for successful adaptation to be achieved by generative means. The effect of structure-preserving transformations on the world and their role in the unfolding of wholeness. The hugeness of configuration space and the way the trajectory of a complex system can reach adaptation. More on adaptational success as a special kind of trajectory through configuration space. Wholeness-preserving transformations are the primary ways the trajectory of a complex system is able to reach successful adaptation.
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