Wholeness is not breakable into parts

Wholeness is not breakable into parts.

—Skye Hirst

Skye Hirst said in a conversation that “wholeness is not breakable into parts”.¹ It caught my attention. I saw it in relation to what Christopher Alexander has been trying to do with patterns.

Christopher Alexander attempted to formulate the principles that lead to a good built environment as patterns. However, he came to believe that patterns themselves are not enough to generate life in buildings.

Christopher Alexander writes:

The [pattern] language, no matter how useful or how powerful, is fallible, and you cannot accept its patterns automatically, or hope they will ever generate a living thing mechanically—becuase…it is only the extent to which you yourself become ordinary and natural, that in the end determines how natural, and free, and whole the building can become.

—Christoper Alexander ²

So long as you are using patterns slavishly, mechanically, they will interfere with your sense of reality…

—Christoper Alexander ³

…the buildings will become alive only when the person who uses the language is himself egoless and free. Only then will he be able to recognize the forces as they really are… But at that moment he no longer needs the language.

—Christopher Alexander ⁴

Patterns cannot capture the life in buildings because they break the wholeness into parts.

Notes:
1. Skye Hirst, in a conversation with me, 2022-09-24.
2. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, pp. 540–41.
3. Ibid., p. 542.
4. Ibid., p. 543.

Related post:
The form of the whole cannot be reduced to parts

Update 2022-10-01: Related post added.