Christopher Alexander Quotes

Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there.

The only thing I do is just pray for inspiration, for a way of thinking, because I don't have any particular goal in sight.

The architect works in the territory of memory.

By the fourth grade, I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.

Building a dollhouse is a lot like writing a novel because you are God of the Universe.

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.

The difference between a builder and an architect is that an architect also cares about desire, about dreams.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

I'm into designing houses and interior design. I like change. I like creating things out of nothing.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

Vision is perhaps our greatest strength... it has kept us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries, it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to the unknown.

Designing is a matter of concentration. You go deep into what you want to do. It's about intensive research, really. The concentration is warm and intimate and like the fire inside the earth - intense but not distorted. You can go to a place, really feel it in your heart. It's actually a beautiful feeling.

Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly.

I always admired Walt's optimism. He seemed to know the direction he was going to. When I was at the studio, I remember he kept driving all of us back down to a more fundamental level all the time.

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

I heard that your subconscious is on the right side. I always shut my right eye when I play, or both eyes. I feel like you go to a deeper place in your subconscious, and you tell the stories that are more deeply within you.

It's really fun and challenging to build things that have never been built before.

In response to the question, 'How do you know when you're finished?' Pollock replied, 'How do you know when you're finished making love?

I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build.

When the mind is allowed to relax, inspiration often follows.

The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.

Steep yourself in your subject, work like hell, and love, honor and obey your hunches.

Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuits of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.

In order to have that incredible groove that makes you dream you have to think not of the groove, but of the dream.