Another entry about architecture and worldbuilding, and the difference between generation vs. creation.

https://asupala.me/2026/02/20/entry-21-the-timeless-way-of-building/

#architecture #worldbuilding #christopheralexander #reading #apatternlanguage

#RandomResourceDrop 🪂🎁
Apl-md is a digitized, open-source version of “A Pattern Language” by Christopher Alexander, enhanced with backlinks, a graph view, and tag groupings.

https://github.com/zenodotus280/apl-md

#Resource #APatternLanguage #ChristopherAlexander #Architecture #Design

Long read with a solid metaphor, that is a story in and of itself. "Landslide; a ghost story" https://www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-ghost-story/ by @kissane

Solidified my appreciation for fact based tools, historical timelines and #ChristopherAlexander all in one piece.

Also has interesting research links on how social media influences if we actually learn from what we read.

Voltei a escrever. O primeiro texto é sobre o matemático, arquiteto e místico Christopher Alexander. Para ler este e outros textos, basta se inscrever por lá.
https://educacaoregenerativa.substack.com/p/o-cientista-mistico

#linguagemdepadrões #patternlanguage #christopheralexander #metadesign

"Christopher Alexander and his group of architects, back in the ’70s, compiled the groundbreaking book A Pattern Language, which looks at the built environment from a city scale down to the décor on your house walls in terms of the human relations that structures and spaces elicit."

#Starhawk, 2016

https://www.ic.org/social-permaculture-what-is-it/

AFAIK this is where digital design pattern thinking comes from too (eg Dark Patterns).

#PatternLanguage #ChristopherAlexander #architecture #Psychogeography #DarkPatterns

I’m getting preoccupied by the parallels between the design theorist Christopher Alexander’s metaphysics of form and Margaret’s Archer morphogenetic approach. The best critique of Archer I’ve read is Mouzelis arguing that she systematically prioritises time over space, leading her to neglect the spatialised exercise over power. I’m increasingly wondering if Alexander’s (somewhat power-blind, it seems to me) architectural theory of morphogenesis as a spatialised process, could be integrated into Archer’s morphogenetic approach.

From Christopher Alexander’s The Process of Creating Life, pg 509:

Why is freedom associated with the morphogenetic character of social processes? Because it is the shape-creating, organization-generating, aspect of process which ultimately allows people to do what they want, what they desire, what they need, and what is deeply adapted to life as it is lived and to experience as it is felt. The humanity of the environment comes about only when the processes are morphogenetic, are whole-seeking, are placed in a context that gradually allows people to work towards a living whole in which each person plays a part. If this point is not clear from what you have read in this book, please read Book 1, chapter 10, to understand more fully what I mean.

I believe we may take on this task, collectively, and can gain effective, instrumental knowledge of our generative system, and thus some measure of awareness and control over the system of processes that generates the world. I choose to define society as that system which creates the human world, and say that its primary ongoing function, and the criterion we should use to judge it by, is its capacity to create and re-create a living world for us.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/11/08/why-is-freedom-associated-with-the-morphogenetic-character-of-social-processes/

#ChristopherAlexander #margaretArcher #morphogenesis

From Christopher Alexander’s The Process of Creating Life, pg 339-340:

The creative work is to illuminate, to reveal what is already there . . . but this takes depth of perception and love . . . certainly profound knowledge of the nature of space and its structure. To do it, successfully, we are called upon to make another crucial revision in our views about the nature of things: We have always assumed that the process of creation is a process which somehow inserts entirely new structure into the world . . . in the form of inventions, creations, and so on. Living process teaches us that wholeness is always formed by a special process in which new structure emerges directly out of existing structure, in a way which preserves the old structure, and therefore makes the new whole harmonious. Thus the process of making wholeness is not merely a process which forms centers or the field of centers in space . . . it is a process which gives special weight to the structure of things as they are.

The enigma is that something new, unique, previously unseen — even innovative and astonishing — arises from the extent to which we are able to attend to what is there, and able to derive what is required from what is already there. . . and that all this, then, will lead to astonishing surprises.

In this context, creativity looks entirely fresh. The act of creation is not a willful process like the art of Michelangelo, which we evaluate according to its novelty. It is, instead, a process in which we most deeply express our reverence for what exists.

If we concentrate on understanding by what process each part must become itself — in just the right way which emerges from its position in the whole — it will be tied to the whole, harmonious with the whole, integrated with the whole, yet unique and particular according to just the unique conditions which occur in that part of the whole. This will give us the living process, and our understanding of it, too, in its entirety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-QVkAAonwc

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/10/17/on-respect-for-what-exists/

#ChristopherAlexander #creation #form