West Dean College Gardens Visitor’s Center: Arches in the transverse load bearing walls

The West Dean Center is a simple one-story masonry building with a large red-tiled roof and intricate brickwork for its thick walls. The building is surrounded by gardens, and its south facing wall has large arched windows overlooking the garden ...

Three simple hand-drawn sketches with elevations of the four arched load bearing walls, providing dimensions of the arched openings in the reception walls, in the kitchen and shop walls, and in the east facing restaurant wall. An additonal fourth sketch ...

Three small hardline drawings with specific dimensions for the arched openings and the arch-forming parts of the walls. The drawings illustrate the kitchen, the reception-restaurant and the shop load bearing walls.

Two initial sketches of the building depicting its transformation from a plain rectangle with long walls pierced with windows, into a structured space by introducing four massive cross-walls, integrated with the functional arrangement of the building. As the design unfolded, ...

Photographs of two early sketches by Christopher Alexander depicting the emergence of the arches; the first is a sketch of a cross-wall, made on a piece of scrap wood, after it became possible to judge the presence, scale and effect ...

Three images of the arched cross-walls supported by low columns, during the construction phase.

Christopher Alexander recognized the importance of the geometry of centers and for years he was looking for the common structural features among buildings, paintings, streets, carpets, doors, windows, etc. which have "life" and "wholeness". He identified fifteen structural features which ...

Focusing primarily on the pure beauty of the geometric order, which comes, above all, from the building structure (columns, walls, beams, vaults and so forth), specifically from the aperiodic grids which form the abstract underpinning of the building structure.

In any process of design or making, the next step which is most structure-enhancing, is that step which most intensifies the feeling of the emerging whole. What ultimately matters in this process is that the work produced generates feeling in ...

“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 ...