In "The Nature of Order," he explores notions of "living centers," qualities that create feelings of aliveness or wholeness in space.
Last year, Alexander began the publication of "The Nature of Order," his four-volume magnum opus, the second volume of which appears next month.
An unclassifiable work, "The Nature of Order" offers the results of his quest to figure out what underlying principles make his patterns work.
This spring, he finally completed his four-volume, 2,150-page magnum opus: "The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe".
"The Nature of Order" has vast ambitions; it floats a hypothesis that Alexander hopes will lead to "a new view of space and matter" and to a different conception of "the fundamentals of the way the world is made".
Besides, as with all of Alexander's writings, "The Nature of Order" is so firmly grounded in the visual, palpable world that it can never be accused of drifting off into cloud-cuckoo-land.
Much more than a do-it-yourself construction manual (though it is that, too), "The Nature of Order" is a grandiose, polemical, sumptuously illustrated and utterly singular inquiry into what Mr. Alexander calls "first principles": the essence of life itself.
"He was surprised when the computer world embraced him," said Mr. Gabriel, whose boss, Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, provided a grant for the completion of "The Nature of Order," a forthcoming four-volume, 2,000-page opus on the spiritual nature of space and the inner life of objects.
He did leave me unpersuaded that what he calls "life" is a property of the physical universe, but I am convinced, after reading the first two volumes of "The Nature of Order," that at the very least, "order" as he meticulously defines it is fundamental to human cognition, which makes it important enough.
