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This chapter investigates the concept of living structure - which is defined as a structural hierarchy that has a recurring pattern of an abundance of small substructures compared to larger ones - and the application of such structures in…
As Christopher Alexander conceived and defined through his life's work - The Nature of Order - wholeness is a recursive structure that recurs in space and matter and is reflected in human minds and cognition. Based on the definition of…
Sustainable urban design or planning is not a LEGO-like assembly of prefabricated elements, but an embryo-like growth with persistent differentiation and adaptation towards a coherent whole. The coherent whole has a striking character -…
As Christopher Alexander discovered, all space or matter - either organic or inorganic - has some degree of order in it according to its structure and arrangement. The order refers to a kind of structural character, called living structure,…
Christopher Alexander offers a critical perspective on the modernist approach to architecture, which he argues has prioritized innovation, abstraction, and mechanistic efficiency at the expense of human-centered and organic values. This…
Conceived and developed by Christopher Alexander through his life's work: The Nature of Order, wholeness is defined as a mathematical structure of physical space in our surroundings. Yet, there was no mathematics, as Alexander admitted…
The third (or organismic) view of space states that space is neither lifeless nor neutral, but a living structure capable of being more living or less living, thus different fundamentally from the first two mechanistic views of space:…
As urban critic Jane Jacobs conceived, a city is essentially the problem of organized complexity. What underlies the complexity refers to a structural factor, called living structure, which is defined as a mathematical structure composed of…
Any image is perceived subconsciously as a coherent structure (or whole) with two contrast substructures: figure and ground. The figure consists of numerous auto-generated substructures with an inherent hierarchy of far more smalls than…
The wholeness, conceived and developed by Christopher Alexander, is what exists to some degree or other in space and matter, and can be described by precise mathematical language. However, it remains somehow mysterious and elusive, and…
To say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder means that beauty is largely subjective so varies from person to person. While the subjectivity view is commonly held, there is also an objectivity view that seeks to measure beauty or…
Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…
The inflationary hot big bang model of cosmology explains the birth of the universe, the appearance of atoms and that of large-scale structures, altogether omitting any reference to the living world. Yet, like the physical world, the living…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
In their recent comment, Cockell et al. argue that the habitability of an environment is fundamentally a binary property; that is to say, an environment can either support the metabolic processes of a given organism or not. The habitability…
Living systems are thermodynamically open but closed in their organization. In other words, even though their material components turn over constantly, a material-independent property persists, which we call organization. Moreover,…
We argue for a convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology, that will come about through asking materials questions about biology and biological questions about materials, illuminated by considerations of information. The…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
The physical processes that determine the properties of our everyday world, and of the wider cosmos, are determined by some key numbers: the 'constants' of micro-physics and the parameters that describe the expanding universe in which we…