

The life of the people on the street is governed by the users who are strangers in general. The article first discusses the tetrad broadly and then considers how it helps to clarify Alexander’s efforts to understand and make wholeness.

The tetrad is used in this article to probe and evaluate Alexander’s conceptual and practical efforts to recognize and fabricate wholeness, drawing on evidence from his Nature of Order and New Theory of Urban Design. Bennett claimed that the tetrad provides an interpretive means for understanding any activity directed toward a focused outcome, for example, writing a book, designing a building, or planning a new city district. This article draws on Bennett’s interpretation of four-ness, summarized by a diamond-shaped symbol that he called the tetrad. For Bennett, each whole number provides different but complementary modes for examining any phenomenon thus, one-ness relates to the wholeness of the phenomenon two-ness, to complementarity three-ness, to relatedness, and so forth. A central assumption of systematics is that there is something inherent in number itself that is fundamental to the way the world is and the way we can understand it. Bennett, who developed a conceptual method-what he called systematics-to clarify phenomena by drawing upon the qualitative significance of number. To identify and evaluate architect Christopher Alexander’s theory of wholeness, this article draws on the work of British philosopher J.G.
