Creative Process

This picture is of the Eishin construction site -- the Great Hall and the Main Gate. It demonstrates using stakes, poles, and ropes, to mark the position of the entrance street, all the time judging the shape and position of the space of the entrance street as it was developing. The creation process [described in this book] presents us with a disarming and powerful potential. Using the comprehensive paradigm of conceptual tools and stepwise actions, and taking the great care that has been described, it is within our power to recover the deeper aspects of human nature and work our way toward a compassionate and ethical civilization. It is possible to recover ourselves, our world, and a future for our children and their children – one that is rooted in profound and lasting values.

Knowing that our devastated civilization cannot be repaired in a hurry, we may assume it can be rebuilt and reaffirmed only if we go very deep into the foundations of this new potential civilization. That requires, as underpinning, a renewed physical world, together with a new way of building and looking after land.

We can begin now. We can lay out a new way of thinking which is, perhaps, deep enough to give us the stepping stones we need to replace the disastrous errors we made during the last century.

If we have sufficient courage, we can make a difference in our lifetimes. In a couple of hundred years we may have recovered ourselves, our wits, our common sense, together with a newly inspired framework, giving us back real architecture as the locus of our new life and our recovery.

The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems, Christopher Alexander, HansJoachim Neis, Maggie Moore Alexander, 2012, Oxford University Press, p. 475.

Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth, Alexander, Neis & Alexander (2012) page 194.