Preface to the Fifteen Properties

The program of this serialized essay is to go through the fifteen properties/transformations that Christopher Alexander defined for buildings in The Nature of Order, and try to map them onto software and software development. I do not promise to address them in the sequence they appear in the book, though so far it looks like the book’s sequence is fine for now. I also do not expect the properties of software to match up perfectly 1:1 to the properties of buildings, but I am nevertheless proceeding through the properties as given to try to see how well, or even if, they fit. I will address any amendments in a conclusory issue.

This first property, levels of scale, which is also the first one in the book, is fortunately an easy one.

Levels of Scale In Buildings

What did Christopher Alexander mean by levels of scale? Literal levels of literal geometric scale. That is, the architecture has prominent features that are big, medium, small, and tiny, and potentially many levels in between. We ask: