Episode 15 : The Nature of Order Part 3

We’ve talked so much on this podcast about individualism versus the collective and the many facets of how it shapes our reality. Our individual needs as humans versus our collective needs as a species. Arguably there would be no existential crisis looming over us if we had the capacity to meet our needs collectively as a species. If every human had running water and food, an adequate place to call home, clean air to breathe, and an opportunity to fulfill their creative purpose, then we could say that everyone might feel like they truly belonged to Earth. And really, at the end of the day, what is more important than just feeling like we belong…

But we don’t.

People are starving. They are living with polluted water. They live on the streets. Or in tiny apartments far removed from the collective spaces that create a society. We’re gridlocked on highways. We go to war over territory. We compete for more stuff and more space to call our own. We compete, we undercut, we gentrify, we consume, we privatize. We privatize. We privatize… all the while awaiting the goddess of everything else to sing her song.

But what if I told you that Alexander, through his bleeding heart that longs for peace, and his brilliant metaphysics, offers us an insight into this societal battle. By the end of this podast, we will see how collective consciousness and individual expression break ground in holy matrimony and move toward stewarding a new world. To be honest, it brings a clarity and illumination to this paradoxical existence in a way that I’ve never experienced.

In Part 1 of this series we discussed the first book, The Phenomenon of Life, Christopher Alexander offered us a new way of seeing. He asks us to look at our entire world—natural and human-made—and notice something simple but remarkably profound… that life isn’t limited to biological entities. Some places and objects, like an old wooden bench under a tree or a courtyard that catches just the right light, seem to hum with life. And that other places and objects… feel lifeless. And he begs us to understand that it’s not just a feeling, but something real, something objective that humans often agree upon. He helps us realize how life shows up in structures, shapes, patterns, and the relationships between things: he shows us the living structure, the order that exists beneath the surface of things, and that when we tune into it, we start to understand what makes a place feel whole.

In Part 2 of the series we discussed the second book, The Process of Creating Life. Alexander shifted from what life is to how we bring it into being. He argues that true life in buildings doesn’t come from following fixed rules or top-down plans. It comes from a slower, more responsive way of creating—what he calls a living process. Instead of designing everything in advance and then forcing it into place, we work step-by-step, listening and responding to what’s already there. Each small move should feel right—not just for that piece, but for the whole. He introduces the idea of “structure-preserving transformations”—a fancy way of saying that each change should strengthen what’s already alive, not tear it apart. This way of working mirrors how nature evolves: not in sudden leaps, but through careful, deliberate unfolding. It’s not just for buildings. This approach will guide anything we make—from a house to a life to a neighborhood.

Which brings us to the present moment. Alexander’s goal in book three is nothing less than attempting to identify the adaptive processes of nature itself so we can act as builders and artists, as nature would. He dares to unravel the secrets that might “allow us to create a harmonious whole that embraces nature and creates buildings, streets, and towns, in a fashion which has the same deep structure as nature, and has the same deep effect on us as a result.” For it is this, he says, which allows true life in our world to form. In such a process the land — the Earth — is to be enhanced continuously by adaptive changes that develop and increase its harmony. Gradually, carefully, step by step, the built world is to be created and recreated constantly in a way that millions of people take part in it. Each process adds one tiny bit of structure he says. Each process deepens the structure. Each building that comes into existence, each house and street and fence and stair rail becomes a harmonious extension of the land. Each part of every building, too, becomes an enhancement of the town in which it sits, an enhancement of its street and neigh borhood. New centers appear a thousand-fold each day, and each center that is added increases and deepens harmony.

In his fourth and final book, The Luminous Ground, Christopher Alexander takes his readers into the deepest waters of his life’s work: a radical reimagining of the universe itself, and with it, the making of our world. He asks us to confront the hidden assumptions that have rendered modern life sterile, to step beyond the mechanistic lens of matter and mechanism, and to glimpse a cosmos infused with value, coherence, and living order. Here, architecture is no longer a neutral craft of shelter and function but the very continuation of nature’s unfolding—a field where quantum mysteries, the pulse of ancient harmony, and the longing of human hearts converge. It is not simply a theory of buildings, but a metaphysics of life itself, inviting us into awe, responsibility, and the possibility of belonging once more to a world made whole.

There’s something in this language that shakes my soul alive. His vision stokes a fire within me, a deep desire to see a world built in such as way. To reach for our imagination’s wildest dreams. Think of the Elvish City Rivendell in Lord of the Rings, or Asgard in Thor, or Naboo in Star Wars. Certain places on Earth have come close to this. There are great historical examples in China, southern England, Japan where culture, craftsmanship and vision culminate into something entirely whole, preserving the aspects of nature which are profound and maintaining the unique culture of the humans within. But perhaps we have only begun to unravel the Nature of Order in this century, and the greatest expressions of human creation still await us. Today we journey toward the stars yet again in search of the profound understanding that is the nature of our universe and our place in it.

Today, on the Infinite Harmony Podcast.

Alexander begins Book Three by describing what he calls the fundamental process—a universal template for how life creates life. At each step, we begin with a perception of the whole. We absorb it. We try to feel its deepest structure. Within this whole, we notice latent centers—large, medium, and small—waiting to be strengthened. We choose the one that will most increase the life of the whole, intensify it, and at the same time allow it to support larger centers, neighboring centers, and smaller centers within it. Once the whole is modified, we begin again.

Once we truly begin to build a world  based on the living process, the entirety of our environment, natural and built, evolves as it should. As “something continually growing, continually developing, continually in flux, yet maintaining itself in a living state.”

This is the nature of life itself. As we know, our bodies are constantly changing, evolving, rebuilding. The static systems of the heart and lungs will be there until we die, but their  molecular makeup is constantly changing and in fact after seven years, all the molecules in our body have changed. This, of course, is also true of a city or a neighborhood The city is “being continuously built and un-built, rebuilt, built, destroyed, modified, built, added-to, improved, destroyed, and rebuilt again. Imagine this single process, this unfolding process, endlessly repeated, always unfolding the existing wholeness.”

In this way, the world becomes something that’s always in motion but always holding together. Alexander compares it to the way a needle in a thousand hands might sew a vast fabric—sometimes stitching a large seam, sometimes a tiny detail. All of it guided by the same sense of what feels right, what brings life. And here’s the important part: this isn’t just an architectural method. It’s a way of being. Whether you’re building a house, fixing a path, or planting a tree, you’re part of the unfolding. If enough of us work this way, Alexander believes, the world will change—not all at once, but in millions of small, meaningful ways.

In Book 3  he shows us a real life example from Jordan, in a neighborhood called East Wahdat. There, a government funded urban planning development committee handed over control to the people who actually live in the homes. The result wasn’t flashy or perfect. It was real. You can see it in the doorways—each one a little different, shaped by the lives behind it. That kind of variety, that intimacy, is the opposite of the cold, cookie-cutter housing we see so often. There’s no sense of showing off or being “unique” for the sake of unique. But there is a sense belonging in each doorway, each common area. Belonging that grows from presence, from use, from imperfection. The Japanese have a word for this: wabi-sabi—beauty that comes from things being worn, weathered, real. It’s what we find in the places we return to again and again, because they feel like home—not a showplace, but a place where we are free to be ourselves.

And this, Alexander says, is what we’re missing. Modern architecture often chases clean lines, shiny surfaces, impressive images. But life doesn’t work that way. Life is messy, particular, evolving. The places that truly feel alive are the ones that allow for the mess—places that invite us in, hold us gently, and change with us.

At the heart of this whole approach is the idea that space can be positive or negative. Not just in how it looks, but in how it feels. Positive space support us, it makes  us feel like we belong. Alexander spends much of Book Three describing what this means at every scale—from big public squares to the small corners of a garden. He shows how the shapes of buildings, streets, and even engineering details can all be shaped by the same deep process. What matters isn’t just function, but feeling. What matters is whether the space allows people to come to life within it. This quality of aliveness can appear anywhere: in a courtyard with vines creeping over the walls, in a café where people linger, in the path of a garden that gently curves instead of cutting straight through. It's not confined to one scale. It shows up in the way public spaces hold us and bring us together, in the gentle outlines of big buildings that still feel human, in the rhythm of streets that follow the land rather than fight it. Even in the way a beam is shaped or a garden is tucked between homes, the living process shows its hand.

He challenges us by exclaiming: if we want to belong to the Earth—and for the Earth to belong to us—we need to build in a way that supports life. That doesn’t mean giving up on technology or planning. It means asking deeper questions. Not “How can we build this faster?” but “What will help this place come alive?” From the smallest bolt to the largest plaza, that’s the question. And the answer won’t come from one person alone. It will come from all of us, working together, bit by bit, hand by hand.

True belonging—real, deep belonging—comes from the way our world lets us be fully ourselves, together. Alexander suggests that what people most need isn’t complexity, but something surprisingly simple: spaces that feel real, where the shape of the world reflects our lives back to us with warmth and understanding.

At the heart of this vision are two insights. First, every part of the city—every house, window, path, or door—should reflect the uniqueness of the people who live and move through it. When our homes, shops, and workplaces support our quirks, our tastes, our way of being, they become places we love, not just places we use. Second, we need public spaces that allow us to see and feel this diversity. Parks, streets, plazas—these places aren’t just functional; they are where we come face to face with the vast, beautiful variety of human life, and where we begin to understand ourselves as part of a whole.

These aren’t just aesthetic preferences. Alexander argues that they are structural truths, visible in the way nature itself organizes things—how leaves form, how rivers braid through valleys, how even cells work together in the human body. When a city follows the same logic, it becomes a living thing. 

Our towns and cities begin to form a network of spaces that are walkable, useful, beautiful, and alive. These are not accidental features. They are the natural result of paying close attention to how people actually live, and to how the world around us wants to grow. Neighborhoods support homes, homes support rooms, and each part offers shelter not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. It is a living, breathing process—something that grows from our hands, our footsteps, our stories.

I’m going to read a lengthy passage from Book three that really sums up the effort he is asking for, from all of us, to participate and take responsibility for the beautification of our surroundings. I’ve made some edits for reading ease because, well, Alexander’s writing style is strange to say the least… 

He says, “I am not talking about broken fences or cracks in the sidewalk — although these things, too, are important, and do need to be fixed. I am talking about larger things, a great tree that has potential but the space around it needs to be taken care of — or another place, a place in the sun here everybody sits because you see the buses passing, people going by, and feel the wind blowing softly.

Everyone knows such places and they need to be identified, because they are precious, and must be protected. On the other hand, the places that are crumbling a little, the dead spots no one likes to be…the ones that feel slightly frightening, or uncomfortable… these too need to be identified. Next time money is spent, it neeeds to be spent making that place better, making the neighborhood better.

You may easily say that it is all a matter of opinion. How could one ever get a firm grip on the evaluation of such places?  In the political nature of the city — who is to say what is to be repaired, what is not to be done.

But it is not a matter of opinion. The vibrance or lack thereof in a place is widely recognized, and can be felt by everyone. It is an objective reality. In his Ph.D. thesis, my student Yodan Rofé studied just such a case in North Beach, San Francisco. He took an area of several blocks and asked people to mark the good places, the bad places, and the in-between places. The correlations between what different people saw and how they evaluated different places when making diagnoses was very high. Using sophisticated measures of rank-order correlation, Yodan was able to prove what I had long suspected: the feeling of good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant, life-giving and life destroying, is firmly established and objectively real, even in something as minor as the way the character changes from place to place along a street.

So every neighborhood in the world can maintain an ongoing, updated diagnosis on a computer, and to refer all future acts, and all capital expenditure, to the continuous improvement of the bad spots, and the continuous enhancement and preservation of the better spots and their latent centers. Even when a new neighborhood is created entirely from scratch, such diagnosis still plays a role in its unfolding. At each moment, the next act looks to the errors, weaknesses, and strengths created in the accumulation of the previous acts, and responds to them, repairs what is weak, and keeps and strengthens whatever is already strong.”

To this point, Alexander implores us to look at public spaces as absolutely essential as private spaces. He looks at what he calls the Hulls of Public Spaces how they help us feel like we belong to a society. This book, like the others, has over a hundred pictures of people in spaces looking and feeling like they belong to the space. Many of these spaces are pedestrian spaces. Now, Alexander is not an opponent of cars, but it makes the obvious observation that in the last hundred years we have prioritized our cars and they have decimated our public spaces. In a city, the car goes everywhere. It is the authority. You could say that the arteries of a city are the roads. They are a center, but they are not necessarily part of the whole. Everything in a city is subordinate to the movement of automobiles.

Probably one of the most profound examples of Alexander’s ideas that I’ve ever experienced was in Davis, California, in a planned neighborhood call the Village homes. Like many of the surrounding neighborhoods, there were ways to move about the neighborhood, somtimes, walking more than a mile, without ever crossing a street. 

The design was brilliant. It will be hard to describe, but I’ll do my best. You might want to get a pen and paper and draw it out… Imagine six city blocks in two rows of three by three rectangles. You’re probably imagining streets running around these city blocks on all four sides right… Now, take away the street that separates the upper three city blocks from the lower three. Now take away the alleyways between all the houses. In those spaces, put pedestrian walkways, which are essentially in between everyone’s backyards. Something like that. 

These pedestrian walkways were huge, with meandering sidewalks, small ponds, benches, trees. It’s like everyone’s backyard faced a public park. You could walk to a neighbor’s house half a mile away without ever seeing a car. The houses are all positioned North-South as to make optimal use of the passive solar energy, use natural drainage systems to capture water to feed public fruit trees and sequester water.

One walk through this neighborhood and I felt a freedom I’ve never felt before. I felt like I wanted to know all my neighbors. I mean, I wanted to live there and make them my neighbors. It was exceptional. It felt like the most optimal design for a neighborhood of houses I’d ever experienced.

Another example that comes to mind is the Highline in New York City, which would eventually inspire the 606 in Chicago. Both are old elevated railways that were converted into pedestrian walkways. The Highline is superior in its architecture and both a work of art and architecture. The mile and a Half stretch is full of astounding vistas of the city, with vines cascading over the railings and plant sanctuaries that offer intimate moments of quiet, water features of children to splash their faces on a hot summer day, thickets of dogwoods, buckeyes and hollies that shade the path for a few hundred feet at a time, terraced seated steps for folks to gather and rest their feet or to watch impromptu performances of street artists, and even climbing areas of exposed steel beams and girders for children to safely play on.

To say it is alive, that it inspires aliveness in all that walk it, and brings life to the city of New York is an understatement. It is everything Alexander dreams of.

This level of care and assessment of our lived world is the effort and attention we have to put in if we want to change how we live. And there’s something to consider here. Something at the very foundation of all the problems we face as a civilization. Because what is civilization really? It mostly exists in cities. Hypothetically it has to exist in cities. We are well past half of the human population living in urban areas. We have 31 mega-cities, with over ten million people. For as much as I love my rural ranch home, the city is the future of humankind, and we must master its architecture and liveability.

Throughout the third book, Alexander takes us from ideas to lived experience. He shows us what this looks like in real places—homes, gardens, streets, whole communities—that have been shaped using living processes. These are not flashy or expensive projects. Many are simple, handmade, and full of personal touches. But they feel right. They feel alive. Why? Because they weren’t imposed from the outside. They grew naturally, slowly, from the needs and dreams of the people who use them and the character of the land they sit on. Step by step, each action built on what came before. The result is a kind of harmony—between the land and the building, between people and place.

Alexander wants us to notice that this process is not something only architects can do. It’s something millions of people are already doing, every day, often without naming it. Every fence post that gets set carefully, every door chosen for its feel, every plant placed in a courtyard with care—that’s part of the process. Like stitches in a vast quilt, these tiny acts add up to something much bigger. A city built this way doesn’t come from one designer’s vision. It emerges from many people working together—sometimes knowingly, often just doing what feels right. The city, like the body, is always changing. Like our cells, its parts are constantly being replaced, renewed, adjusted. That’s what makes it alive.

With this aliveness comes that belonging we are searching for, the true belonging that arises when people share a deep vision of their community—not just agreements about practical needs, but also about the dreamlike and symbolic meanings that make life feel whole. Such belonging depends on a shared understanding of what life in a place means, the vessel in which people can live a a beautiful life.

And again, this process in no way, shape, or form is intended to elimiate uniqueness. In fact, uniqueness is crucial. Individualism is crucial. I’m excited to dive deeper into the role of the individual and the collective in the living world later in this podcast, but for now, know that a living process can only occur when each aspect of a building or space reflects the unique characteristics and needs of those whom inhabit the space. Be that individual or family or cultural group. Our expression, when harnessed thoughtfully is one of our greatest gifts. It is the core tool of the artist and as we’ve seen already, to Alexander a living world is a pure expression of form, that instinctively performs the necessary functions. 

And he is applying this level of care and creativity from the smallest detail to the entire structure. In every living system, the smallest structures determine the fate of the largest forms: a shift in a particle’s charge reshapes galaxies; the grain of tempered steel shapes a sword’s edge; the folding of DNA governs the body. Architecture is no different. The wholeness of a building depends not only on its form but on the reverent attention paid to its finest details. If the microstructure is careless or dead, the larger whole cannot live. Wholeness is woven from the large into the very small, and each level must support the other. When the making of a building, or any system for that matter, because if you haven’t figured it out, we’re not just talking about buildings… extends its care all the way down—to the carving of a beam, the laying of stone, the curve of a window sill—the material begins to radiate life. Details become mirrors of the self: each grain of wood, pane of glass, or carved capital resonates with the human presence. Traditional architecture thrived on this, where every element embodied spirit through substance and craft. In such work, beauty is not surface decoration but a harmony of matter and meaning that lets buildings feel deeply alive. And when we make the world in this way, it does not stand apart from the Earth but becomes its continuation, a further unfolding of the land’s own order. Each gesture in the process of shaping form preserves what is already there, deepening harmony rather than erasing it, extending the life of the field, the slope, the tree line into fence, stair, roof, and square. In this way, architecture is not an imposition upon nature but an extension of its process, another layer of its unfolding. Both curved and rectilinear forms are born from the same rhythm of growth; both are bound by the same demand for wholeness. When building honors this, what arises is not a battle of culture against wilderness but a cultivated nature where wild and human-made are woven into a single living field. Here the ecology is not one of preserving a static wilderness but of cultivating continuities, restoring balance between river and path, plaza and grove, hedge and wall, so that the land and the city deepen one another. The Earth is not diminished but completed in our acts of building, and in turn, our buildings find their life only by entering into that wider communion with the soil, the sky, and the water.

This way of building belongs to the discipline of attending to what is—not to abstraction, not to the heroic image—but to the subtle and patient revelation of wholeness, step by step. It is in this attention that the life of the city is secured, a life that is at once ordinary, intimate, and profound. Life cannot arise otherwise. The process of making in wholeness is not one option among many; it is categorical, the very condition of belonging. Only when a society allows its forms to emerge in this way can people truly belong to the world they inhabit. The future must be drawn out of the present, step by careful step, or else it will ring hollow, stripped of life. When the process is right, creation becomes almost effortless, as natural as blackberries spreading along the edge of a garden wall. The difficulty lies not in the making, but in the discipline: to set aside ego, abstraction, and the desire to impose concepts, to act instead in service of the wholeness that is always already there. A world built in this way awakens archetypal feelings, stirs something ancient and recognizably human in us, and reveals our kinship with the land and one another. In such a world, the buildings and the earth are not in opposition but are reflections of one continuous life. And when we are immersed in such places, we feel again what it means to belong—to be folded into a coherence that is larger than ourselves, and yet which grants us a deeper selfhood by its embrace.

To Alexander, this is our birthright: to live in a world of living structures, to recognize it as a mirror of our own being, to know with certainty what is whole and what is dead. It is not a mystery hidden from us, but a knowledge inscribed in our bodies, a language that we speak without words when we are surrounded by places that are whole. Yet this voice, which once guided the shaping of cultures and cities, is fading from the world. Indifference spreads like a fog; ugliness is accepted as progress; silence becomes complicity. People have stopped trusting their own direct sense of life, the felt recognition of beauty and coherence that once stood as a compass. And if this language of the heart is lost, the possibility of a living world may be lost with it. What then remains is our task: to defend this birthright, to insist gently yet unwaveringly on what awakens life, even when the voice that says so seems fragile, even when it risks ridicule in an age trained to dismiss it. For without that voice, the Earth and its people drift toward deadness. But with it—if we hold fast, if we nurture it, if we give ourselves to it—the world may yet unfold again as nature, whole and alive, and we ourselves will be restored to our rightful place within it. Alexander ends the third book with this fragile insight and says  that in this way, he feels like our birthright has been lost…