Slate Article: Do You See a Pattern?

Sometimes, as if by accident, some one doing the good work of trying to live in respect to the land and its people, gets recognized by the media. Christopher Alexander's four volume book The Nature of Order(2002) is a wonder of building healthy relationships with each other, ourselves, and nature. He understands that when we recognize a form that appeals to us that we are actually recognizing an inner kinship between us, an echo of our "I" in them. This is a different twist on Neo-Platonism and Alexander teases out, recognizes, and then honors the underlying relationships between who we are and what the world around us is. This is a bit of very old perennial wisdom found in many indigenous cultures. And he accomplishes this in our cultural context by taking us through very common every day human experiences that can be applied with nails and a hammer to grasp the luminous quality of our lives. Simple, really.

A dear friend in art, Margaret Davis, just sent me this article from Slate

By Witold Rybczynski about Christopher Alexander receiving the Vincent Scully Prize, and is a good review of Alexander's contribution to architecture.