In his earlier work, Alexander attempted to formulate the principles that lead to a good built environment as patterns, or recurring design solutions.
He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make.
Hundreds of color photographs offer concrete examples of the kind of spaces, things and buildings you can achieve when you put Alexander's theories into practice.
All four books of The Nature of Order present a new framework for perceiving and interacting with our world, a methodology for creating beautiful spaces, a cosmology where art, architecture, science, religion and secular life all work comfortably together.
Six hundred pages of projects built and planned over a thirty-year period, including many un-built experiments, illustrate the impact which is likely to follow from the use of living process in the world.
The book provides the reader with an intuitive feel for the kind of world, its style and geometry, which is likely to follow, together with its ecological and natural character.
With these examples, lay people, architects, builders, scientists, artists, and students are able to make this new framework real for themselves, for their own lives, and for their own work.
[2] The foundations of modern scientific thought, four centuries old, are firmly rooted in a conception that the universe is a machinelike entity, a play of baubles, machines, trinkets.
How are spirit, soul, emotion, feeling to be introduced into a building, or a street, or a development project, in modern times?
In this process, he approached religious questions from a scientific and philosophical rather than mystical direction, focusing in human feelings, well-being and nature interaction rather than metaphysics.
Alexander breaks away completely from the one-sided mechanical model of buildings or neighborhoods as mere assemblages of technically generated, interchangeable parts.