The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems (Center for Environmental Structure)

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Description

The purpose of all architecture, writes Christopher Alexander, is to encourage and fortify life-giving activity, dreams, and playfulness. But in up to date decades, whilst our buildings are technically better–more sturdy, more waterproof, more energy efficient– they have also became increasingly more sterile, rarely providing the type of environment in which people are emotionally nourished, genuinely happy, and deeply contented.
The use of the example of his building of the Eishin Campus in Japan, Christopher Alexander and his collaborators reveal an ongoing dispute between two fundamentally different ways of shaping our world. One system places emphasis on subtleties, on finesse, on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. The other system is concerned with efficiency, with money, power and regulate, stressing the more gross aspects of size, speed, and profit. This second, “business-as-usual” system, Alexander argues, is incapable of creating the type of environment that is in a position to genuinely fortify the emotional, whole-making side of human life. To confront this sterile system, the book presents a new architecture that we–both as a world-wide civilization, and as individual people and cultures–can create, The use of new processes that allow us to build places of human energy and beauty. The book outlines nine ways of working, each one fully dedicated to wholeness, and able to fortify day-to-day activities so that you can make planning, design and construction conceivable in an entirely new way, and in more humane ways.
An innovative thinker about building techniques and planning, Christopher Alexander has attracted a devoted following. Here he introduces a way of building that includes the best current practices, enriched by a range of new processes that fortify the houses, communities, and health of all who inhabit the Earth.

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