The Living Technology of Christopher Alexander

Let’s start with the insight, Alexander says, that living systems are able to make extraordinarily coherent structures, like dragonflies, or roses, or humans. These coherent structures are remarkably well organized, and remarkably beautiful. (As we will see, that’s not a coincidence.) Biologists call this process “morphogenesis” — the generation of structures, in this case living ones.

Alexander proposes (on the basis of many others’ work in physics, biology, and cosmology) that these morphogenetic processes generating coherent structure are going on all the time — in fact, are at the heart of living processes, which are themselves more elaborate forms of the same kind of structure generation. So the capacity for morphogenesis is deeply ingrained in the structure of matter (both animate and inanimate) and nature, even if living organisms seem to be relatively rare phenomena.

Morphogenesis is closely related to ecological sustainability — the ability of organisms to maintain stability in the face of very dynamic and even hostile environments — because it is nothing other than the process by which living systems adapt to the changes that would otherwise destroy them. So it’s very important that we understand this kind of process, and understand how we do and don’t incorporate it into our own actions. Can our technologies and our way of making things reflect living processes? This includes our making of buildings, cities, and landscapes — Alexander’s primary focus as an architect.

If we don’t do this, then we risk creating fragmentations, rifts, disordering mechanisms. Up to a point, this may not matter — our environment has sufficient resilience to absorb minor disruptions. But at some uncertain boundary — perhaps a sharp threshold — we risk the collapse of critical systems on which our human well-being depends. That’s because fragmentation destroys the morphogenetic ability itself. There is ample reason to be alarmed that we are approaching just such a state today.

How did we get into this predicament? We humans are very good at assembling large complex structures from lots of standardized parts. We started doing it with rifles, where one rifle design was broken down into parts, and we could make thousands or millions of identical rifles from sets of identical parts. Following essentially this technique, we have built our world today.

Nature occasionally does something like this too, when it makes, say, billions of individual blood cells that are largely interchangeable — so much so that we can even swap them between certain people, and they will continue to carry out their complex processes and functions. In a similar way, a soldier can swap out his bolt assembly with another rifle, and it will still function.

Yet nature seldom works this way: every creation of structure is embedded in a context, with its unique circumstance, adaptation, and evolutionary history. Even in the rigid realm of crystals, there is mind-boggling variety among snowflakes, for example. If we could somehow swap out the arms of one snowflake with another, we would find that they never fit symmetrically. The context, not the thing, is the key. We might say: nature is complex — and all complexity is local!

When we create the parts of rifles or buildings, we treat the whole as being “composed” of its parts. But this is an abstraction: a whole is not simply the sum of its parts. Leaves do not “make” a tree. In fact, the tree makes the leaves! Each step of morphogenesis transforms a previous whole, in which the connected parts go through some kind of patterned restructuring. They may group together, they may differentiate, they may form various kinds of structured sets in relation to one another — but always, they do so in characteristic patterns, based on fundamental properties of space and the physical structure of the cosmos. The more important evolution occurs in the connections, though these are much harder to visualize.

The Living Technology of Christopher Alexander. Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros. Metropolis Magazine