Christopher Alexander
Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander was an Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist. He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software design, and sociology. Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor.
In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of the pattern language movement. According to creator Ward Cunningham, the first wiki—the technology behind Wikipedia—led directly from Alexander's work. Alexander's work has also influenced the development of agile software development.
In architecture, Alexander's work is used by a number of different contemporary architectural communities of practice, including the New Urbanist movement, to help people to reclaim control over their own built environment. However, Alexander was controversial among some mainstream architects and critics, in part because his work was often harshly critical of much of contemporary architectural theory and practice.
Alexander is best known for his 1977 book A Pattern Language, a perennial seller some four decades after publication. Reasoning that users are more sensitive to their needs than any architect could be, he collaborated with his students Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid King, and Shlomo Angel to produce a pattern language that would empower anyone to design and build at any scale.
His other books include Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A City is Not a Tree, The Timeless Way of Building, A New Theory of Urban Design, ''The Oregon Experiment, the four-volume The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, about his theories of "morphogenetic" processes, and The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth'', about the implementation of his theories in a large building project in Japan.
Personal life
Alexander was born in Vienna, Austria to his Catholic father, Ferdinand Johann Alfred Alexander, and Jewish mother, Lilly Edith Elizabeth Alexander. As a young child, Alexander emigrated in fall 1938 with his parents from Austria to England, when his parents were forced to flee the Nazi regime. In England, his parents worked as German language teachers. Alexander spent much of his childhood in Chichester and Oxford, England, where he began his education in the sciences. He moved from England to the United States in 1958 to study at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He moved to Berkeley, California in 1963 to accept an appointment as Professor of Architecture, a position he would hold for almost 40 years. In 2002, after his retirement, Alexander moved to Arundel, England, where he continued to write, teach and build up to the time of his illness and death. Alexander was married to Margaret Moore Alexander, and he had two daughters, Sophie and Lily, by his former wife Pamela Patrick. Alexander held both British and American citizenship.On 17 March 2022, Alexander died of pneumonia in his home in Binsted, England.
Education
Alexander attended the Dragon School in Oxford and then Oundle School. In 1954, he was awarded the top open scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in chemistry and physics, and went on to read mathematics. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Architecture and a master's degree in mathematics. He took his doctorate at Harvard. His dissertation "The Synthesis of Form: Some Notes on a Theory" was completed in 1962. He was elected fellow at Harvard. During the same period he worked at MIT in transportation theory and computer science, and worked at Harvard in cognition and cognitive studies.Honors
Alexander was elected to the Society of Fellows, Harvard University 1961–64; awarded the First Medal for Research by the American Institute of Architects, 1972; elected member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Arts, 1980; winner of the Best Building in Japan award, 1985; winner of the ACSA Distinguished Professor Award, 1986 and 1987; invited to present the Louis Kahn Memorial Lecture, 1992; elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1996; one of the two inaugural recipients of the Athena Medal, given by the Congress for the New Urbanism, 2006;. awarded the Vincent Scully Prize by the National Building Museum, 2009; awarded the lifetime achievement award by the Urban Design Group, 2011; winner of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, 2014 and 1994 Seaside Prize recipient.Career
Author
The Timeless Way of Building described the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire:A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, co-authored with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, described a practical architectural system in a form that a theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar. The work originated from an observation that many medieval cities are attractive and harmonious. The authors said that this occurs because they were built to local regulations that required specific features, but freed the architect to adapt them to particular situations. The book had its beginnings with an early version of Alexander's PhD dissertation based on fieldwork in the Bavra village in Gujarat, India.
The book provides rules and pictures, and leaves decisions to be taken from the precise environment of the project. It describes exact methods for constructing practical, safe, and attractive designs at every scale, from entire regions, through cities, neighborhoods, gardens, buildings, rooms, built-in furniture, and fixtures down to the level of doorknobs. A notable value is that the architectural system consists only of classic patterns tested in the real world and reviewed by multiple architects for beauty and practicality.
The book includes all needed surveying and structural calculations, and a novel simplified building system that copes with regional shortages of wood and steel, uses easily stored inexpensive materials, and produces long-lasting classic buildings with small amounts of materials, design and labor. It first has users prototype a structure on-site in temporary materials. Once accepted, these are finished by filling them with very-low-density concrete. It uses vaulted construction to build as high as three stories, permitting very high densities.
This book's method was adopted by the University of Oregon as described in The Oregon Experiment, and remains the official planning instrument. It has also been adopted in part by some cities as a building code.
The idea of a pattern language appears to apply to any complex engineering task, and has been applied to some of them. It has been especially influential in software engineering where patterns have been used to document collective knowledge in the field.
A New Theory of Urban Design coincided with a renewal of interest in urbanism among architects, but stood apart from most other expressions of this by assuming a distinctly anti-masterplanning stance. An account of a design studio conducted with University of California Berkeley students on a site in San Francisco, it shows how convincing urban networks can be generated by requiring individual actors to respect only local rules, in relation to neighbours. A vastly undervalued part of the Alexander canon, A New Theory is important in understanding the generative processes which give rise to the shanty towns latterly championed by Stewart Brand, Robert Neuwirth, and Charles III, the then Prince of Wales. There have been critical reconstructions of Alexander's design studio based on the theories put forward in A New Theory of Urban Design.
The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, which includes The Phenomenon of Life, The Process of Creating Life, A Vision of a Living World and The Luminous Ground, is Alexander's most comprehensive and elaborate work. In it, he put forth a new theory about the nature of space and described how this theory influences thinking about architecture, building, planning, and the way in which we view the world in general. The mostly static patterns from A Pattern Language were amended by more dynamic sequences, which describe how to work towards patterns. Sequences, like patterns, promise to be tools of wider scope than building.
The online publication Katarxis 3 includes several essays by Christopher Alexander, as well as a debate between Alexander and Peter Eisenman from 1982.
Alexander's final book published while he was alive, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems, is the story of the largest project he and his colleagues had ever tackled, the construction of a new High School/College campus in Japan. He also used the project to connect with themes in his four-volume series. He contrasted his approach, with the construction processes endemic in the U.S. and Japanese economies. As Alexander describes it, System A is focused on enhancing the life/spirit of spaces within given constraints ; System B ignores, and tends to diminish or destroy that quality because there is an inherent flaw: System A is a generally a product of a different Economic System than we live in now. When the architect is only responsible for concept and casual field drawings, the builder finds that System A can not produce acceptable results at the lowest market cost. Except for a culture where land and material costs are low or first world clients who are sensitive, patient and wealthy. In most cases, the economically motivated builder must use a hybrid system. In the best case, System AB, the builder uses the processes of System A to differentiate, improve and inform his work. Or there are no economic considerations and the builder is the architect and is building for himself. In the last few chapters he described "centers" as a way of thinking about the connections among spaces, and about what brings more wholeness and life to a space.