[First draft of an article prepared for a special issue of The Side View, focusing on the work of American architect

and architectural theorist

Christopher Alexander, to be published in 2021 or 2022]

Finding the Center

David Seamon

I
n all his many books and designs, American architect Christopher Alexander’s focus is
wholeness, life, and spirited place making. He explains that, “In any environment we
build—building, room, garden, neighborhood—always, what matters most is that each
part of this environment intensifies life.”1 His aim, he writes, is “trying to find forms for
buildings in which people may feel themselves at home.”2 In his search for an architecture
of at-homeness, wellbeing, and animation, Alexander has designed and fabricated several
significant buildings as well as generated a remarkable theory of understanding, envisioning, and
building that he has variously described as “pattern language,” “the timeless way of building,”
“the quality without a name,” “the nature of order,” and “wholeness-extending transformations.”
In this article, I highlight Alexander’s concept of “center,” which offers one way to identify the
crux of his work, whether thinking or designing. Most broadly, a center is any spatial
concentration or organized focus of more intense pattern or activity—for example, an intricate
carpet pattern, an elegant entryway, a handsome arcade, a gracious building, or an animated
plaza full of users finding pleasure in the place. Whatever its specific nature and scale, a center is
a region of concentrated physical and experiential order that provides for an intense spatial and
lived relatedness among things, people, situations, and events. A center is “an organized zone of
space … which, because of its internal coherence, and because of its relation to context … forms
a local zone of relative centeredness with respect to the other parts of space.”3 A pivotal question
for Alexander is how an understanding of centers might help architects to conceive of and
actualize vigorous places and environments that sustain thriving human life.

Collecting and Studying Turkish Carpets

Though first introduced in Alexander’s A New Theory of Urban Design (1987), the concept of
centers is most thoroughly explicated in his A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and
Geometry of Early Turkish Carpets (1993), a topic that, at first glance, might seem considerably
removed from architecture—Turkish village carpets of the 14th–17th centuries. Starting in the
early 1970s, Alexander collected these carpets and, at one point, owned an internationally
admired collection.4 Alexander surmised that the weavers of these early carpets were probably
Sufis—Islamic holy men and women who sought to encounter God through mystical rapture.
Alexander suggested that each carpet expressed “the ultimate oneness of everything” and “a
pattern which is the infinite domain.”5

Alexander admired these carpets because of their compelling presence and spirit, which, when he
began his collection, he could only understand dimly. He studied the carpets intensively,
intuiting that, if he paid careful, extended attention, they might instruct him in authentic
wholeness and genuine order:
I began to realize that carpets had an immense lesson to teach me: that as organized
examples of wholeness or oneness in space, they reach levels which are only very rarely

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 reached in buildings. I realized, in short, that the makers of carpets knew something which,
if I could master it, would teach me an enormous amount about my own art.6
Foreshadowing presents the lessons he learned from 74 of these carpets, all illustrated in color
photographs at approximately one-tenth scale (see the two examples below). At the start,
Alexander emphasized that the carpets’ power and wholeness is not a matter of personal
preference or taste but, rather, “a definite, tangible, and objective quality which really does exist
to a greater or lesser degree in any given carpet.”7 The heart of this quality, he concluded, relates
to the colors and, especially, the geometry of the carpets. “It is the geometry,” he wrote, “the
interlock of the shapes, the very striking boldness of the geometric shapes, and the way that
figure and ground reverse, and the many, many levels of scale, which bring the softly shining
color to fruition.”8
In Foreshadowing, Alexander developed a method for looking at the carpets that might offer
consensus as to each carpet’s relative degree of presence and beauty: “To study wholeness, we
must have an empirical way of distinguishing it from preference.”9 In this sense (though he
would not phrase it this way himself), he developed an implicit phenomenology of carpet
geometry, drawing on personal discoveries made after studying the carpets for “1000s of
hours.”10 He emphasized that an accurate judgement of a carpet’s relative beauty and wholeness
is not easy but requires prolonged experience and extended periods of disciplined looking and
seeing. He concluded, however, that newcomers can begin to sense the relative power of carpets
if they can bypass personal preferences and look at the carpets in a broader, more open way. This

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relative strength of a carpet is partly related to its “staying power”: “if you had to look at the
thing over and over... which one stays the longer?”11

Understanding and Seeing Centers

For Alexander, the crux of powerful carpet geometry is centers—smaller or larger gatherings of
pattern seen as units or wholes. Centers are “local configurations that appear whole in the
design” or, again, “a psychological entity which is perceived as a whole, and which creates the
feeling of a center in the visual field.”12 Typically (but not always), the centers of a carpet are
bounded units that the eye reads as a larger or smaller visual whole. The drawing, below left,
illustrates the most obvious kind of center: a mandalalike pattern that looks like a flower
blossom. To the right of this example is a less regular center—an archlike pattern with projecting
“arms” and “lily” at the top.

As can be seen in these two examples, a crucial characteristic of a center is that it is composed of
other centers and, in turn, may be an element of some larger center or centers. In the blossom
fragment, for example, the flower form, as a whole, is a center, but so are the five small white
hexagons, the four small squares, the central eight-pointed star, the eight surrounding dark
octagons, and so forth. In turn, this blossom is but a small part of a much larger carpet pattern.
This nesting possibility leads to a first important feature of a strong center: It does not get its
power from its shape or elements alone but, also, from the gathering of other centers that it
contains or of which it is a part. There is, in other words, a potential synergy among centers that
in the best carpets supports a density of pattern and connection:
...every carpet contains hundreds, in many cases even thousands of centers, strewn, packed,
and interlocked, throughout its structure.... The degree of wholeness which a carpet
achieves is directly correlated to the number of centers which it contains. The more centers
it has in it, the more powerful and deep its degree of wholeness.13
In clarifying the power of the Turkish carpets in greater detail, Alexander identified four
qualities that contribute to the relative strength of a carpet and its centers: (1) symmetry; (2)
positive and negative space; (3) levels of scale; and (4) distinctiveness. He claimed that, by far,
most centers in carpets are symmetrical, with at least one bilateral symmetry (for example, the
carpet patterns illustrated above). There are some centers, however, that are not symmetrical,
though, crucially, these centers, first, are almost always composed of smaller symmetrical
centers; and, second, almost always contribute toward forming a larger symmetrical center.
Alexander pointed out that another common aspect of powerful centers is a strong use of positive
and negative space so that every part of the carpet, from small to large, contributes to geometric
pattern and interconnection. Particularly important is whether the ground space supporting a
figure has its own sense of form and thus generates its own sense of center around the center that
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the figure itself makes:
In a really good carpet, there is no distinction between figure and ground; every single
piece of space, or almost every single piece, is a center; and the resulting density of centers
is enormous, since there are centers everywhere, intertwining, interlocking, overlapping,
and side by side …. It is an almost infallible rule that the presence of beautifully organized
centers in the ‘negative’ space is the clue to the beauty of a carpet. When the negative space
is powerful, well-organized, we almost always have a design of power and beauty. When
the negative space is poorly organized, shapeless, and lacks centers, we almost never have
a carpet of any artistic value.14
At the same time, however, Alexander emphasized that local symmetries and good figure-ground
relationships do not necessarily guarantee a powerful carpet. For example, an infinite chessboard
of black and white squares has many symmetries and a strong sense of figure-ground yet poorly
bears repeated viewings and quickly becomes uninteresting. This fact leads to a third central
quality of strong centers—that they contain a range of scale, in other words, “a cascade of levels
or steps in size”:15
...the real depth of any center comes from the fact that it exists, and works, at many levels
simultaneously. In such a center symmetries and positive space do not occur only at a
single level, but at many different levels, each one nested in the one above it, each being
detailed, or ‘having children’ in the ones below it.16
But what about the amount of change these steps in level best incorporate to be most effective?
Based on his thorough study of the carpets, Alexander concluded that each center must be
roughly one-third to one-half the size of the next largest center. In this way, the range of levels
provides a set of parts that are, at each scale, readily legible yet also comprise a larger network
that has its own cohesion and pattern. The result is an “ambiguous web where large and small are
united to form a complete and seamless unity.”17
Alexander concluded that the fourth aspect of a powerful carpet relates to its centers being
distinct: that each center is distinguishable and, therefore, set apart from the other centers around
it. A design does not work, Alexander argued, unless it is made “of a number of distinct,
identifiable entities, each with its own identity.”18 Ways whereby the weavers created a strong
distinctiveness include boldness of shape, contrast with adjacent centers, and strong color
differences.

The Byzantine-Timurid Prototype

Having sketched out Alexander’s argument broadly, I want to illustrate it with a specific
example drawn from a pattern that he calls the Byzantine-Timurid prototype, a small portion of
which is illustrated, below right.19 In looking at this pattern, one notices how the pattern shifts.
At first, the black shapes seem to be the “substance” of the pattern, but then one notices that the
white shapes offer “substance” also. Negative and positive spaces reverse visually. No space is
wasted in the sense that every part contributes to the pattern seen.

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Also notice the several different centers of various
scales, packed together to create a sense of density. The
smallest are the white diamonds that, together, make up
the eight-pointed star in the upper left. On the right side
of the star are black squares above and below as well as
the black lines separating the diamonds that make up the
star. In turn, these black centers combine to make a
larger center running horizontally from the white star to
create an arrowlike structure with black spirals turned
inward at the arrow’s base. In turn, these black spirals
intermingle with larger white spirals that shape
diagonally a large black “flower” upside down with a
black diamond at the base of its “stem” next to the white
star.
In short, one finds several differently sized centers in this portion of carpet pattern, all inter-
locked so that positive and negative spaces readily reverse. This rich geometric concentration
Alexander identified as density—an inseparable thickness of spatial pattern and relationship.
What is striking is that this small carpet portion is part of a larger design much more laden with
centers (see drawing below).

A 21st-Century Art
In Foreshadowing, Alexander asked why Sufi weavers could create such dense patterns of
centers in their carpets. His answer related to the weavers’ seeking to use craft to find “union
with God.”20 In this sense, the most important value of the carpets was not their beauty but,
rather, their power to penetrate more deeply “into the human soul than other carpets do ... their
special worth is spiritual and religious—not only aesthetic.”21 At the same time, Alexander
suggested that we modern Western people are typically oblivious to the power of centers because
of a Renaissance-inspired, anthropocentric view of the world that reduces its contents and
situations to what human beings can know and control. In relation to understanding the Turkish
carpets, this people-centered perspective produces an emphasis on things and parts rather than
interlinkages and wholes:
5
 Since [human beings] became elevated as the center of things [at the time of the European
Renaissance], a sharp focus of attention on figure without ground became more and more
common, while the unifying spiritual vision of the Middle Ages and of the Islamic world,
in which every point of space was a spirit-carrying center, became forgotten.22
Alexander suggested that 21st-century art and architecture might incorporate a return to a density
of centers, since this is what the best and most beautiful carpets (or for that matter, any well-
designed thing) possess. In all his work, the aim is to understand the nature of density and to use
that understanding for design and building. He explained that such understanding in architecture
is not easy:
There, too, in making a building, one is searching for just such a center or pattern of
centers—a which contains within itself the full range of the relationships … —dense and
self-sufficient. It may sometimes take weeks, months to find the necessary structure of a
particular center. It is hard work … —not at all the kind of thing where shapes merely drop
off the pencil—instead, it is hard wrought structure, found with pain and difficulty.23
Other than this comment, Alexander said little in Foreshadowing about how practically an
understanding of carpet geometry might contribute to better architectural design. In fact, in A
New Theory of Urban Design, published six years before Foreshadowing, he and colleagues had
already applied the theme of centers directly to the design of energized city neighborhoods.
There, his description of the most beautiful towns and cities closely parallels the qualities of the
Turkish carpets:
Each [town and city]... grew as a whole, under its own laws of wholeness... and we can feel
this wholeness, not only on the large scale, but in every detail: in the restaurants, in the
sidewalks, in the houses, shops, markets, roads, parks, gardens and walls. Even in the
balconies and ornaments.24
In A New Theory, Alexander drew on the concept of centers to revitalize urban neighborhoods
and districts by requiring that any new element in the urban-design process—be it building, open
space, street furniture, or something else—“must be a ‘center’ in itself, and must also produce a
system of centers around it.”25 In New Theory, he presented a conceptual approach that might
facilitate a rich fabric of urban centers, thus grounding the notion as it can have practical
meaning for the making of buildings and places, including robust urban environments.

A Theory of Centers
In his four-volume masterwork, The Nature of Order, Alexander provided the most
comprehensive set of directives for facilitating centers, density, and wholeness, whether in art,
decorative objects, buildings, or entire places.26 In that work, Alexander’s means for
understanding and making wholeness are twofold: first, a set of fifteen structural properties that
he claimed reoccur in all things, buildings, places, and situations that evoke wholeness and life;
second, a step-by-step method of making whereby each stage in the design of a particular project
becomes a pointer for what is to come next through the recognition, guided in part by the fifteen
principles, of creating more and more density, order, and life.
In Nature of Order, centers remain the most prominent of the fifteen structural properties,
absolutely essential for intensifying the life and wholeness of the thing made, whether artwork,

6
decorative object, building, or landscape. Alexander discussed centers most thoroughly in the
first volume’s third chapter, “Wholeness and the Theory of Centers” where he explained that,
when one thinks of things in the world as separate entities, one focuses on their boundedness and
isolation. In contrast, when one understands these things as centers, one becomes more aware of
their relatedness and pictures them as “focal points in a larger, unbroken whole”27 One sees “the
world whole.”28 In a note to this chapter, Alexander explained how, for years, he “struggled with
the idea that everything—all form—was made of entities.”29 His confusion finally dissipated
when he realized that
all these troublesome entities … were not truly entities but were in fact non-bounded
centers: Centers of influence, centers of action, centers of other centers—centers of some
kind, appearing in the seething mass of wholeness … I finally realized that this way of
looking at things was logically consistent, solved all the earlier problems of ‘entities’, and
was a sold footing on which a theory of order could be properly built.30
When reading Alexander, one remembers the art works, objects, environments, and places that
have given happiness, wonder, and joy—some deep quality of presence and grace that makes life
worth living. In the Turkish carpets, this quality is “a feeling of an archaic soul produced in the
shape alone.”31 For the built environment, this feeling is much the same—a sense of relationship
and rightness that makes one feel more present, whole, and alive. The obligation, says
Alexander, is that the thing built must work “to create a continuous structure of wholes around
itself.”32 The potential result is a dynamic weave of centers, dense in their interrelationships and
alive in the vibrancy of human life they propel. As Alexander persuasively explained:
Wholeness is made of centers. Centers appear in space. When the wholeness becomes
profound, we experience it as life, in buildings and other artifacts, in nature, even in
actions. The life is able to be more profound or less profound because the centers
themselves have different degrees of life, and the life of any one center depends on the
life of other centers. The life of a building thus comes about as a recursive phenomenon
in which different centers prop each other up and intensify their life cooperatively. [This
spatial coordination] is responsible for the functional life in a building (the way it works)
and for the geometric life (its beauty). These are one and the same thing.33

Notes
1
Christopher Alexander, HansJoahchim Neis, and Maggie Moore Alexander, Battle for the Life
and Beauty of the Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 115.
2
Christopher Alexander, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very
Early Turkish Carpets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 7.
3
Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order, Vol. 1: The Phenomenon of Life (Berkeley, CA: Center
for Environmental Structure, 2002), p. 84.
4
Christopher Alexander, A New Way of Looking, Hali, Vol. 13, No. 2 (April 1991), pp. 114–
125. Hali is “an international magazine for fine carpets and rugs”; this article discussed
Alexander’s exhibit of early Turkish rugs held in fall, 1990, at San Francisco’s DeYoung
Museum in conjunction with the sixth International Conference on Oriental Rugs. Alexander
asked the question, “What makes these carpets great?” which he answered by saying that “A
great carpet—when I stand before it—makes me feel the force of my own life.” He related this
force to any creative act, including architecture, and contended that “the main task is to make
things that intensify our lives, buildings that make us feel our life and our existence more vividly,
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more intensely” (p. 125).
5
Foreshadowing, p. 21.
6
Ibid., p. 15.
7
Ibid., p. 26.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid., p. 27.
10
Ibid., p. 17.
11
Ibid., p. 30.
12
Ibid., p. 32.
13
Ibid., p. 36.
14
Ibid., p. 53, p. 55.
15
Ibid., p. 61.
16
Ibid., p. 62.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid., p. 63.
19
Ibid., pp. 56-57; pp. 130–137; p. 351; drawings on p. 56.
20
Ibid., p. 89.
21
Ibid., p. 90.
22
Ibid., p. 274.
23
Ibid., p. 70.
24
Christopher Alexander, Hajo Neis, Artemis Anninou, and Ingrid King. A New Theory of Urban
Design, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 2.
25
Ibid., p. 92.
26
These volumes, all published by the Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, California,
are: The Nature of Order, Vol. 1: The Phenomenon of Life (2002);The Nature of Order, Vol. 2:
The Process of Creating Life (2002); The Nature of Order, Vol. 3: A Vision of a Living World
(2005); and The Nature of Order, Vol. 4: The Luminous Ground (2004). A summary of the four
volumes is Christopher Alexander, Empirical Findings from The Nature of Order,
Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, Vol. 18, No. 1 (winter 2007), pp. 11–19.
27
Nature of Order, Vol. 1, p. 85.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid., p. 107, note 12.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., p. 92.
32
New Theory of Urban Design, p. 22.
33
The Nature of Order, Vol. 1, p. 314.

Figures
th
p. 2, left: Star carpet with flowers, Karapinar, Turkey 17 C. or older, 144 cm x 238 cm
(Alexander, Foreshadowing, p. 213).
p. 2, right: Early carpet with spotted lobes, Konya, Turkey, 14th C? 128 cm x 253 cm (Alexander,
Foreshadowing, p. 168).
p. 3, left: Round blossom from the Blossom carpet fragment (Alexander, Foreshadowing, p. 32).
p. 3, right: A niche of the coupled column prayer rug (Alexander, Foreshadowing, p. 33).
p. 5: A small portion of the Byzantine-Timurid prototype, a Turkish-rug pattern (Alexander,
Foreshadowing, p. 56).

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p. 5: A larger portion of the Byzantine-Timurid prototype, a Turkish-rug pattern (Alexander,
Foreshadowing, p. 56).

David Seamon is Professor of Environment-Behavior and Place Studies in the Department of

Architecture at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. He is Editor of Environmental and
Architectural Phenomenology, which celebrated thirty years of publication in 2019. His latest
book is Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making (Routledge, 2018).