10 structure-enhancing actions that intensify the life and wholeness of a thing, according to Ch. Alexander

 (1) step-by-step adaptation;

(2) each step helping to enhance the whole;

(3) always making centers;

(4) allowing steps to unfold in the most fitting order;

(5) creating uniqueness everywhere;

(6) Working to understand the needs of clients and users ;

(7) evoking and being guided by deep feeling of the whole:

(8) finding coherent geometric order;

(9) establishing a form language that arises from and shapes the thing being made;

(10) always striving for a simplicity by which the thing becomes more coherent and pure.

Alexander claims that, when thoroughly understood and practically mastered, these steps, always interconnected and overlapping, will contribute unfailingly to a living process that, at each stage in its development, “always starts from the wholeness as it currently exists at that moment. At the next moment, we take a new step—introducing one new bit of structure (always composed of new, living, centers) into the whole. The new structure may be large, medium, or tiny; it may be physical or abstract; it may occur on the land itself or in a person’s mind, or in the collective understanding of a group of people.

But the point is that at every state of every life-creating process, the new bit of structure which is injected to transform and further differentiate the previously existing wholeness, will always extend, enhance, intensify the structure of the previous wholeness by creating further and stronger, living centers…. The structure-enhancing step, which again and again intensifies one center and creates ‘hooks’ to other new centers, might even be called the fundamental process” (vol. 2, p. 216).

Source: http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/Alexander_orderall.htm