The character of nature

"What happens in a world - a building or a town - in which the patterns have the quality without a name, and are alive?

The most important thing which happens is that every part of it, at every level, becomes unique. The patterns which control a portion of the world, are themselves fairly simple. But when they interact, they create slightly different overall configurations at every place. This happens because no two places on earth are perfectly alike in their conditions. And each small difference, itself contributes to the difference in conditions which the other patterns face.

This is the character of nature

"The character of nature" is no mere poetic metaphor. It is a specific morphological character, a geometric character, which happens to be common to all those things in the world which are not man-made.

To make this character of nature clear, let me contrast it with the character of the buildings being built today. One of the most pervasive features of these buildings is the fact that they are "modular". They are full of identical concrete blocks, identical rooms, identical houses, identical apartments in identical apartment buildings. The idea that a building can - and ought - to be made of modular units is one of the most pervasive assumptions of twentieth-century architecture.

Nature is never modular. Nature is full of almost similar units (waves, raindrops, blades of grass) - but though the units of one kind are alike in their broad structure, no two are ever alike in detail.

(...)

Even atoms have this character.

It may surprise you to realize that the same rule even holds for atoms. No two atoms are the same. Each atom is slightly different, according to its immediate environment.

It is particularly crucial to discuss this fact about atoms, because so many people take "modular" construction for granted. If you challenge the builder of a modular environment, he will very likely say that nature itself is built from modular components - namely atoms - and that what is good for nature is good enough for him. In this sense, atoms have become archetypal images of modular construction.

But atoms are all unique, just like raindrops and blades of grass. Because we use the symbol C for every atom of carbon, and because we know that every atom of carbon has the same number of protons and electrons in it, we assume that all atoms of carbon are identical. We think a crystal as an array of identical parts. Yet the fact is that the orbits of the electrons are influenced by the orbits of electrons in nearby atom, and are therefore different in each atom, according to its position in the crystal."


Christopher Alexander, "The Timeless Way of Building", capítulo 8, The Quality Itself