In New York Times, Laura Miller reviews (requires registration; via Matt Webb) the first two volumes of Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order series:

[Alexander’s classic, A Pattern Language] is easiest to digest if you read its 253 numbered sections [each about a pattern] in reverse order, from smallest to largest, since most of the thinking on regional and urban planning [at the beginning of the book] reflects the starry-eyed utopianism of its day: nice, but wildly impractical, politically and economically.

… “The Nature of Order” offers the results of [Alexander’s] quest to figure out what underlying principles make his patterns work. … [I]t floats a hypothesis that Alexander hopes will lead to “a new view of space and matter” and to a different conception of “the fundamentals of the way the world is made.” This theory, very crudely summarized, would be based on the understanding that order is inherent in space and systems and that they are more or less “alive” based on the quality of the order they manifest.

… Alexander repeatedly … presents two images—a pair of buildings or drawings or household objects or country roads—and asks the viewer to choose the one that has the most “life.” … The quintessential pairing asks people to choose between a diner-style saltshaker and a bottle of the best-known brand of ketchup. According to Alexander, 80 percent of the people asked choose the saltshaker, and his experiments with other pairings along these lines yield similar results; when asked to pick which of two images looks most “right” in some vague way, a great majority of respondents gravitate to one …