How can creative people–architects and planners, artists and writers, musicians and performance artists–foster a sense of “wholeness” in their work?
Christopher Alexander, one of the last century’s most important architects, who died last month at the age of 85, offers a mind experiment to explore this question.
Take a blank piece of paper, he urges in his masterwork The Nature of Order, and put a dot anywhere. Below, compare the sheet of paper with nothing (on the left) and the sheet with just a dot (right).
“Although the dot is tiny, its impact on the sheet of paper is very great,” Alexander says. “The blank sheet of paper is one whole, one kind of wholeness. With the introduction of the tiny dot, the wholeness changes dramatically.”
The dot creates a number of possibilities for organizing and understanding space. When we focus on one thing, everything else changes around it.
Then what? The dot can give rise to a number of different possibilities. Like this:
Or this:
Or This:
Or this:
Those arrangements, in turn, suggest dynamic relations between the parts, as we see here:
“We begin to experience a subtle and pervasive shift in the whole,” Alexander says. “The space changes throughout the sheet of paper (and not only where the dot is), vectors are created, differentiation reaching far beyond the dot itself occur within the space. As a whole, an entirely different configuration has come into being, and this configuration extends across the sheet of paper as a whole.
Alexander, as an architect, is most concerned with the implications for place-making. A good place—a building, a park, a plaza, a beach, anyplace really—begins with a center. One center often spins off other smaller centers, which relate to each other. Each center has its own character—not just scale and materials and shape, but also feelings of warmth and character and naturalness.
Consider the centers that help orient us in a simple house. The front door provides the center to the front of the house; everything relates to that focal point. Once inside, a prominent window in the parlor provides a new center. So does an arch. So does a fireplace. So does a prominent piece of furniture. So does a piece of art.
But Alexander’s mind experiment also teaches important lessons for writers and storytellers.
Singling out any detail has the effect of shaping everything else. Your greatest challenge as a writer, really, is to figure out which ones—which ideas or feelings, images or relationships … .which centers—you want to highlight.
Christopher Alexander’s dot is similar to Wallace Stevens’s famous jar:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill. …
Amazing, isn’t it, to see how a whole landscape can be transformed with a focus on a single object. So when you write or design, ask yourself: What’s my dot? What’s my jar?
