C.E.S. Office – Martinez House: Terrazzo floor with squares, diamonds and crosses

The second building completed on the Martinez site, was a 2,000 square feet house. A gunite all-concrete building as well, it was the first sizable and fully functional project in which C.E.S. used gunite, while applying all permit and specification ...

Full-scale paper mock-up with gouache paint, depicting the first alternative for the terrazzo floor of the main room — a geometric pattern composed by squares, diamonds and crosses, in green, red and white.

Full-scale paper mock-up with gouache paint, depicting the second alternative for the terrazzo floor of the main room — a geometric pattern composed by grey stripes with blue crosses and white squares with a blue central detail.

Full-scale paper mock-up with gouache paint, depicting the third alternative for the terrazzo floor of the main room — a geometric pattern composed by interlaced red and yellow crosses with a small blue square detail inside the red crosses.

Seven color drawings of various designs for the terrazzo floor of the kitchen room; variations on the red, yellow and blue color patterns.

Two color drawings of terrazzo floor designs for the kitchen room; two variations on blue and white color patterns.

Photograph of the finished floor in the main room.

Close-up photo of the floor pattern in main room floor.

Photographs of the watercolor mock-ups by Christopher Alexander, illustrating the four alternative designs for the terrazzo floor.

Christopher Alexander postulated that centers and the field of centers they create are the building blocks from which wholeness is made. However, he further argued that geometry alone is not sufficient, and that color is the way wholeness comes to ...

Ornament arises as part of the design process, when a person is making and seeks to embellish this "something" while making it. It arises as a result of the latent centers in the uncompleted thing requiring still more centers, requiring ...

“A Vision of a Living World”, the third volume of “The Nature of Order” series, presents, for the first time, a full spectrum of Alexander’s and CES built and unbuilt works. The book describes hundreds of buildings, plans, neighborhoods, drawings, ...

Cassette tape of the nineteenth Fall semester lecture by Christopher Alexander on “Actual Making & Construction Details”, part of a series of lectures on “The Nature of Order”; the duration of the lecture is about one hour and twenty minutes.