Living Structure Down to Earth and Up to Heaven: Christopher Alexander

TL;DR

This paper defends living structure as an objective physical phenomenon rooted in organized complexity, illustrating its properties, principles, and empirical evidence across natural and human-made environments to clarify its scientific basis.

Contribution

It clarifies the physical and empirical nature of living structure, connecting Alexander's design concepts with fundamental laws and providing evidence from diverse case studies.

Findings

Living structure exhibits organized complexity governed by scaling and Tobler's law.

It is generated through differentiation and adaptation principles.

Empirical evidence from cities, streets, buildings, and logos supports its physical reality.

Abstract

Discovered by Christopher Alexander, living structure is a physical phenomenon, through which the quality of the built environment or artifacts can be judged objectively. It bears two distinguished properties just like a tree: "far more small things than large ones" across all scales, and "more or less similar things" on each scale. As a physical phenomenon, and mathematical concept, living structure is essentially empirical, discovered and developed from miniscule observation in nature- and human-made things, and it affects our daily lives in some substantial ways, such as where to put a table or a flower vase in a room, helping us to make beautiful things and environments. Living structure is not only empirical, but also philosophical and visionary, enabling us to see the world and space in more meaningful ways. This paper is intended to defend living structure as a physical phenomenon, clarifying some common questions and misgivings surrounding Alexander's design thoughts, such as the objective or structural nature of beauty, building styles advocated by Alexander, and mysterious nature of his concepts. We first illustrate living structure - essentially organized complexity, as advocated by the late Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) - that is governed by two fundamental laws (scaling law and Tobler's law), and generated in some step by step fashion by two design principles (differentiation and adaptation) through the 15 structural properties. We then verify why living structure is primarily empirical, drawing evidence from Alexander's own work, as well as our case studies applied to the Earth's surface including cities, streets, and buildings, and two logos. Before reaching conclusions, we concentrate on the most mysterious part of Alexander's work - the hypothesized "I" - as a substance that pervasively exists everywhere, in order to make better sense of living structure in our minds.