For some time now I have been reading, a page or two at a time, Christopher Alexander's four volume work The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, which is marvelous, idiosyncratic, visionary, and practical, the product of deep collaborative experience and a free mind.
The third and fourth volumes are more focused on architecture, which is Alexander's field. Not being an architect, I discovered that one way to regain my concentration/curiosity when reading his description and analysis of the process followed in contracting and carrying out particular building projects is to imagine that he is describing the process of organizing a cooperative, or some other social movement-building project. I can then see how the deep patterns and principles are relevant to the work.
