Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale - AD Primer

Conclusion

From Nature

‘[…] when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature as you make it.’

Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, 1977¹

If we look very closely at our fingers, we find the familiar pattern of friction ridges, spiralling in towards the centre, towards the tip; it is a place of almost electrical sensitivity. Zoom out and we are reminded again that all scales are interconnected – by the same patterns found in shells and ferns, in whirlpools and tornadoes, and in the image of our solar system seen from outer space.

If one objective of this book is to talk about connections between people and places, and also to discuss connections between experiences – large and small, near and far, fast and slow – and scale-connections between the patterns of Nature and the man-made world, then another, although perhaps more latent than overt within the text, is to think about beauty. Remembering Alberti’s definition of beauty as the harmony between elements of varying scales, Nature is the key; ‘Neither in the whole body nor in its parts does concinnitas flourish as much as it does in Nature herself; thus I might call it the spouse and soul of reason.’²

Fingerprint spiralThe connectedness of patterns from the microscopic to the macroscopic is ...