Alexandrian Density

ChristopherAlexander described how the use of one or two patterns in a structure doesn't make it noteworthy, but that when many patterns are used in an overlapping fashion in a small space, the net effect can be profound.

Does anyone have the exact reference in the ChristopherAlexander literature?

[A Pattern Language, pp. xli-xliv, "The Poetry of the Language".]

While you're waiting for a more intelligent answer, Dafydd, just the above explanation has helped me appreciate your comment on WikiWikiKudos a whole lot more. Very helpful and true of Ward's achievement here. -- RichardDrake

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This was an early conjecture that one can find in many places in the RugBook (e.g., Ch. 5, p. 36). But by NatureOfOrder he refines this view and goes on to give a rather formal definition of Wholeness based on a definition of coherence that underlies the TheoryOfCenters?. It is no longer based on density. The definition is quite involved, but he lays the foundations for it as follows, based on a trivial rectangular tesselation of the field R into n elements.

To make the idea of different degrees of coherence explicit, we introduce a measure of coherence c, on the subregions of R. Call each possible subregion of R, S(i), where i ranges from 1 to 2**n. The coherence of the i-th subregion S(i) is then to be c(i). Each c(i) is a number between 0 and 1, and every subregion of R is to be given its measure of coherence. The most coherent regions have a c(i) which is close to 1; the least coherent regions have a c(i) which is 0 or close to 0.''

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CategoryJargon