The Nature of Order – An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe.
Book Four – The Luminous Ground

“The Luminous Ground” is the fourth and last volume of “The Nature of Order” series. In this volume, Alexander attempts to show the cosmological underpinning of the nature of order. The book has two goals. First, to show that the intellectual scheme of wholeness and centers that has been laid out and elaborated in Books 1-3, while not consistent with the mechanistic cosmology that has been current since the time of Descartes, is consistent with a new cosmology in which the personal is a necessary integral part of the nature of matter.
The book also describes a view of architecture and art in which the “I”, Alexander’s phrase for the personal core of existence, is necessarily part of the interpretation of centers.
The book contains what is virtually a book within a book, Alexander’s theory of color, in which he shows the rules for calculation with color, and an analysis of great color masters like Van Gogh, Bonnard, and the Persian miniaturists.
Most important are two chapters, the first and the last, showing the implicit assumptions under our prevailing cosmology, and a new cosmology, based on the set of assumptions, which follow from the analysis of order given in these four books. This book, mystical and personal, describes a realm of existence rarely touched in modern scientific writing. It is, perhaps, the first time that a serious cosmological theory has been set on a foundation of questions that arise in Architecture.
The book was exhibited at Locus Manifesto-exposition “Re-enchant the World: Architecture and the City facing society´s transitions”, together with others in Science Cabinet #1.