In his work, Alexander seeks a way to return a sense of wholeness to the buildings and environments of modern Western society. He emphasizes that the crucial process is healing. Every new construction, whether building or square or street furniture or window detail, must be made in such a way as to heal the environment, where “heal” especially means “make whole.” The obligation is that the thing built must work “to create a continuous structure of wholes around itself”

In his explication of the floor, wall, and roof, Thiis-Evensen assumes that there are various shared existential qualities‑-insideness-outsideness, gravity-levity, coldness-warmth, and so forth‑-that mark the foundation of architecture.

Heidegger suggests that building relates to dwelling, which therefore can be said to involve a sense of continuity, community, and at-homeness

an architect's aesthetic sense is subjective because he or she has not thoughtfully considered how architectural forms arise from and translate themselves back into shared existential qualities like motion, weight, substance, insideness, outsideness, permeability, closure, and so forth.

There will always be a certain tension, a kind of imperfection, between what we wish, do, and make. The significant questions are how do we dwell in our own particular situations and how can we shape the quality of our dwelling for better or worse?

the universality of architectural expression

also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine.

When we speak of dwelling we usually think of an activity that man performs alongside many other activities. We work here and dwell there. We do not merely dwell-that would be virtual inactivity-we practi~e a profession, we do business, we travel and find shelter on the way, now here, now there.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

When we speak of man and space, it sounds as though man stood on one side, space on the other. Yet space is not something that faces man. It is neither an external object nor an inner experience.

Man's Being rests in his capacity to cultivate and safeguard the earth, to protect it from thoughtless exploitation and to defend it against the calumnies of the metaphysical tradition.

Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That ~or which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is,_ gathered, b! virtue of a locale,' that is, by such a thing as the bndge.

site for t_he fourfold, a site that i~ each case ,J?.rovides for a space. The relation between locale and space lies in llie essence of these things as locales, but so does the relation of the locale to the man who lives there. Therefore we shall now try to clarify the es-sence of these things that we call buildings by the foJJowing brief consideratio