This is a piece of art I picked up at the thrift store the other day, one that I kept picking up and putting back and returning to to stare at. It’s some sort of long stitch embroidery. And I love it.
And it’s so fitting. Two Christmases ago I stumbled across Christopher Alexander’s 1979 The Timeless Way of Building in our local bookstore, though I’ve only recently been spending any real time in it. I had never heard of him but I knew within seconds it was something worth the $60 price.
To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name.
The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person, and the crux of any individual persons story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
We can identify the towns and buildings, streets and gardens, flower beds, chairs, tables, table cloths, wine bottles, garden seats, and kitchen sinks which have this quality— simply by asking whether they are like us when we are free.
We need only ask ourselves which places—which towns, which buildings, which rooms, have made us feel like this—which of them have that breath of sudden passion in them, which whispers to us, and let us recall those moments when we were ourselves.
And the connection between the two—between this quality in our own lives, and the same quality in our surroundings—is not just an analogy, or similarity. The fact is that each one creates the other.
Places which have this quality, invite this quality to come to life in us. And when we have this quality in us, we tend to make it come to life in towns and buildings which we help to build. It is a self-supporting, self-maintaining, generating quality. It is the quality of life, and we must seek it, for our own sakes, in our surroundings, simply in order that we can ourselves become alive.
A man is alive when he is wholehearted, true to himself, true to his own inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situations he is in. …
To be happy, and to be alive, in this sense, are almost the same … and above all, the man is whole; and conscious of being real.
This state cannot be reached merely by inner work.
There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need to only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that cure himself, he need only change himself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy for a man to imagine that his problems are caused by “others.” But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any way on his surroundings.
The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.
Workshops mix with houses, children run around the places where the work is going on, the members of the family help in the work, the family may possibly eat lunch together, or eat lunch together with the people who are working there.
The fact that family and play are part of one continuous stream, helps nourish everyone. Children see how work happens, they learn what it is that makes the adult world function, they get an overall coherent view of things; men are able to connect the possibility of play and laughter, and attention to children, without having to separate them sharply in their minds, from work. Men and women are able to work, and to pay attention to their families more or less equally, as they wish to; love and work are connected, able to be one, understood and felt as coherent by the people who are living there.
And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.
