It is a common experience that attempts to solve just one piece of a problem first, then others, and so on, lead to endless involutions. You no sooner solve one aspect of a thing, than another point is out of point. And when you correct that one, something else goes wrong. You go round and round in circles, unable to produce a form that is thoroughly right.
Christopher AlexanderThe buildings that I build very often have a dreamlike reality. I don't mean by that they have a fantasy quality at all, in fact quite the reverse. They contain in some degree the ingredients that give dreams their power... stuff that's very close to us.
Christopher AlexanderThere is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.
Christopher AlexanderImages in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality. Buildings were judged more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.
Christopher AlexanderNowadays, the process of growth and development almost never seems to manage to create this subtle balance between the importance of the individual parts, and the coherence of the environment as a whole. One or the other always dominates.
Christopher Alexander