A glimpse of God in matter 

An interview with architect Christopher Alexander on his new work The Nature of Order, which seeks to discover, using the vocabulary of architecture, the divine elements that unify all beautiful created matter.

By Britt Peterson
(November 1, 2005)

Architect Christopher Alexander may have just succeeded in doing what philosophers back to Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle have eternally sought to do: find God through science. In his four-volume work titled The Nature of Order, Alexander uses the vocabulary of architecture and the empirical tools of a scientist to discover the principles of what he calls “life.” Following his 30-year study of life and the universal human response to it, Alexander illustrates his idea that matter must hold within it something life-like — something God-like — which all humans understand as a pleasing beauty and order.

A professor emeritus of architecture at University of California, Berkeley, Alexander spoke recently with Science and Theology News editorial intern Britt Peterson about the importance of science and religion to architecture, and his empirical search for the face of God in the physical world.

What were some of your first lessons and how did you come up with the ideas you’re writing about today?

I was astonished by the intellectual poverty of architecture as it was taught to me in the late 50s. It made me quite sick actually, and I have spent the rest of my life trying to work out what architecture actually is. I’m a practicing architect and I build a lot of stuff, so I wanted to know what it was all about. I began thinking about that when I was [a graduate student] at Harvard and really haven’t stopped to this day.

When the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., opened on Memorial Day 2007, temperatures inside the 100,000-square-foot complex began to spike. Huge crowds of warm bodies will do that to an HVAC system, and it took months of tweaking through the museum's first hot summer to get the system working properly. 

Mike Zovath, senior vice president of Answers in Genesis, the organization that built the Creation Museum, says he has learned his lesson. As a consortium that includes his group prepares to break ground this spring on a biblical theme park called Ark Encounter, which will include a replication of Noah's Ark built according to the dimensions given in the Book of Genesis, it is turning to the latest trends in "green" architecture. Scheduled to open in 2014, Ark Encounter will include environmentally sustainable technology "from Day One," Zovath said, and will be built by a firm that specializes in LEED-certified construction and design, the industry standard for environmentally efficient buildings.

That means geothermal heating, rainwater capture, active and passive solar heating and specialized window glazing. Even the 500-foot-long ark, which its owners say will be the largest timber-framed structure in America, will use sustainable heating and cooling, and lighting designed to reduce energy expenditure.

One might say that stories about green architecture have now officially jumped the ark. For a decade, at least, new office buildings, hotels, and even shopping centers have been trumpeted with news of their LEED ratings, which range from merely "certified" through silver, gold and the much-coveted platinum. Churches, synagogues and other places of worship have competed for environmental status through the LEED process. But it is a mark of success of the LEED standards, promulgated by the U.S. Green Building Council, that there is a new comfort level with them among conservative religious groups, including biblical literalists.