Form comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our 'in touchness' with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?
In digital design, products and services are frequently imagined and implemented placelessly: as if the consumer were jacked into The Matrix, and considering this product or that product from among an infinite set of choices at an infinitely-provisioned mercantile. The things we make are good, by this way of reasoning, if they fit the market’s demand.
My attitude toward Alexander’s teachings prior to experiencing the places and spaces realized in his practice was akin to what Alan Watts said about certain teachings in The Bible:
Sometimes, as St. Paul pointed out, commandments are not given in the expectation that they will be obeyed, but in the expectation that they will reveal something to those who hear them.
Today, my answer is unequivocal. My interpretive lens: literal. Time and again, across cultures and continents and islands and oceans, in five different places now I’ve examined the evidence, and am persuaded.
Occasionally, one or two students out of sixty would take this task [of timeless thinking] up with some seriousness, and before too long would visit me in office hours to see if I could relieve them of their distress. They needed me to assure them that what Alexander says in his books isn’t…you know…real. For a number of reasons, not the least of which being the seeming incompatibility between how they’d been taught to think about design and what these teachings insist one must do in order to be, as they might say, “doing it right.”
And having never been to any of Alexander’s buildings, I’d simply turn the question around and ask “but what if it is real?”