Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander is a practicing architect, builder, and

Emeritus Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He is
also the author of numerous articles and books, including The Nature of Order: An
Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (2004) a four-volume
compilation representing 30 years of work and offering three vital perspectives on
our world: (1) A scientific perspective; (2) a perspective based on beauty and grace;
and (3) a commonsense perspective based on our intuitions about everyday life. The
four books in the series include The Phenomenon of Life; The Process of Creating
Life; A Vision of the Living World; and The Luminous Ground. This series provides
a new framework for perceiving and interacting with the world, a methodology for
creating beautiful spaces, and a cosmology where art, architecture, science, religion
and secular life all work comfortably together
Through these books and the PatternLanguage.com website, Alexander and his
colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure have built a movement which,
in their words, lays the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building
and planning, which will replace existing ideas and practices entirely.
At the core of this movement is the idea that people should design houses, streets,
and communities for themselves. This idea may imply a radical transformation of the
architectural profession, but it emerges quite simply from the observation that most
of the beautiful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. In
2002-2003 Alexander has pursued hisINTEREST IN the community development
through two projects in particular: the revitalization (redevelopment) of downtown
Duncanville, Texas, and the creation of a new community in the hills near Brookings,
Oregon.

BIOGRAPHY
Christopher Alexander was born in Vienna, Austria in 1936. He was raised in
England, and he holds a Bachelors degree in Architecture and Masters Degree in
Mathematics from Cambridge University, and a PhD in Architecture from Harvard
University. In 1958 he moved to the United States, and he has lived in Berkeley,
California since 1963. Alexander taught architecture at the University of California,
Berkeley, where he is now an Emeritus Professor of Architecture. In 1967 he founded
the Center for Environmental Structure, and he remains its President.
He is the father of the Pattern Language movement in architecture as well
as the pattern movement in computer science, and he is principal author of the 1977
book A Pattern Language, a seminal work that was perhaps the firstCOMPLETE
BOOK written in hypertext. In 2000, he founded the website PatternLanguage.com,
and he now serves as its Chairman of the Board.
Alexander has designed and built more than two hundred buildings on five
continents, laying the groundwork for a new form of architecture, one that looks far
into the future yet has roots in ancient traditions. Much of his work has heavily
utilized technological innovations designed to build a living architecture, especially
for the use of concrete, shell design, and contracting procedures. He has served as a
consultant to city, county, and national governments on every continent, and has
advised corporations, government agencies, and architects and planners throughout
the world.

He was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, is a
fellow of the Swedish Royal Society, and has received innumerable architectural
prizes and honors, including the firstGOLD medal for research from the American
Institute of Architects, awarded in 1970.

His biography, Christopher Alexander: The Evolution of a New Paradigm in

Architecture, by Stephen Grabow, was published in London and Boston in 1983, and
his film biography, Places for the Soul: The Architecture of Christopher
Alexander, was released in 1990.

PERSPECTIVES
The Phenomenon of Life (Nature of Order Book One). Alexander proposes a
scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life
and sets this understanding of order as an intellectual basis for a new architecture.
With this view as a foundation, we can ask precise questions about what must be
done to create more life in our world whether in a room, a humble doorknob, a
neighborhood, or even in a vast region. He introduces the concept of living structure,
basing it upon his theories of centers and of wholeness, and defines the fifteen
properties from which, according to his observations, all wholeness is built.
Alexander argues that living structure is at once both personal and structural.
The Process of Creating Life (Nature of Order Book Two). In the 20th century
our society was locked into deadly processes which created our current built
environment, processes of which most people were not really aware and did not
question. Despite their best efforts and intentions, architects and planners working
within these processes, could not achieve a living built environment. In this book,
Alexander puts forward a fully developed theory of living process. He defines
conditions for a process to be living: that is, capable of generating living structure.
He shows how such processes work, and how they may be created. At the core of the
new theory is the theory of structure-preserving transformations. This concept, new
in scientific thinking, is based on the concept of wholeness defined in Book 1: A
structure-preserving transformation is one which preserves, extends, and enhances
the wholeness of a system. Making changes in society, so that streets, buildings,
rooms, gardens, towns may be generated by hundreds of such sequences, requires
massive transformations. This book is the first blueprint of those transformations.
A Vision of a Living World (Nature of Order Book Three). Providing hundreds of
examples of buildings and places, this volume demonstrates proposes forms for large
buildings, public spaces, communities, neighborhoods, which then lead to
discussions about the equally important small scale of detail and ornament and
color. With these examples, laypeople, architects, builders, artists, and students are
able to make this new framework real for themselves, for their own lives, and
understand how it works and its significance.
The Luminous Ground (Nature of Order Book Four). The mechanistic thinking
and the consequent investment-oriented tracts of houses, condominiums and offices
in the 20th century have dehumanized our cities and our lives. How are spirit, soul,
emotion, feeling to be introduced into a building, or a street, or a development
project, in modern times? In this final text, Alexander breaks away completely from
the one-sided mechanical model of buildings or neighborhoods as mere assemblages
of technically generated interchangeable parts. He shows us conclusively that a
spiritual, emotional, and personal basis must underlie every act of building. This
radical view can conform to our most ordinary, daily intuitions. It may provide a path
for those contemporary scientists who are beginning to see consciousness as the
underpinning of all matter, and thus as a proper object of scientific study. And it will
change, forever, our conception of what buildings are.
A Pattern Language: The Living Structure of Places. Looking closely at the
living structure in good and bad buildings, human artifacts, and natural systems,
Alexander proposes that the living order depends on those features that closely
connect with the human self. The quality of works of art, artifacts, and buildings is
defined not merely in terms of living structure, but also in their capacity to affect
human growth and human well-being.
The Overlapping Organization of Cities. In his classic essay, A City is Not a
Tree,(1965) Alexander explains why separate functions have come to dominate the
world of urban planning, and why this is an unhealthy way of building our cities.
City-building, he holds, has become dominated by narrowly focused professions,
mainly because human beings do not seem to possess the mental capacity to
holistically perceive the complex social, environmental, and economic processes that
collectively shape urban life. Referring to a variety of experiments, Alexander
demonstrates how the human mind tends to separate elements and arrange them in
categories and visually separate spaces. When people are faced with complex
organization, they reorganize natural overlap into non-overlapping units. He refers
to this non-overlapping structure as a tree, and argues that the complex
organization of cities is in fact more suited to semi-lattices which are healthy
places, although extreme compartmentalization and dissociation of internal elements
can lead to destruction. In a human, dissociation marks schizophrenia, and in a
society it marks anarchy. For a city to remain receptive to life, social interaction, and
human prosperity, it must unite the different strands of life within it. Planners and
designers must therefore allow for a mix of functions and be open-minded to organic
change.
Interactions between Cars and Pedestrians. While most people are either for
cars or for pedestrians, Alexander believes the two can function as a pair. While the
relationship between pedestrians and cars has always been an uneasy one, their
simple separation is not a sustainable solution for making cities livable. He has
instead developed a pattern for analyzing and improving the interactions between
cars and people. In the ideal interaction between pedestrians and cars, both are
vibrant, and the two zones are separate but touch everywhere. He describes five ways
in which this can happen:
 Where cars are moving slowly, people and cars can mix up, meaning that at
very low density traffic, there do not necessarily need to be sidewalks.

Creating quiet places with good space for pedestrians and narrow slow space
for cars.

Wide, densely traveled pedestrian streets may cross densely traveled roads
with cars and buses, best at a right angle.

Pedestrian lanes can be designed to be internal to a block. According to

Alexanders observations, most points on pedestrian paths should be within 150
feet of the nearest road.

Where cars dominate there should be easy access to beautiful and pure
pedestrian space.

Starting with What is Beautiful Now. By beginning with spaces that are already
beautiful, Alexander shows how we can adopt an organic process of city-building and
discover the right order of places. Designing places in the right order has a major
impact on the quality of community life. The right order for a place is often
unexpected. To discover the right order of a particular place, we should begin by
implementing any tiny improvements that are feasible now. Specific spots or
segments in a city that work well do so for a reason, and because they are naturally
used by the community, these spaces form the spine of the area and making good
starting points for wider improvements. According to Alexander, small incremental
changes will enhance the spirit of the place and encourage the accumulation of
further changes. Using this approach, we can connect new spaces to already beautiful
ones while allowing for change and adaptation through lived experience.
Harmonizing the Shape of Public Buildings. The quality of public buildings
depends on how they harmonize with their surrounding environment. A great public
building makes the environment better, but its construction must draw upon the
existing positive patterns in that environment. Alexander emphasizes that great
buildings emerge without artifice and without egos, and that the volume and space
around the building site must inspire the buildings construction. His pattern
language provides guidelines for how to proceed through such a process of
inspiration in a logical but also emotional way.
Triangulation: Arranging Overlapping Functions in Small
Spaces. Although he was not the first to use the term, Alexander has greatly
enriched our understanding of how triangulation fits into larger patterns of urban
life. Triangulation occurs when a space allows for two or more overlapping functions
and thus facilitates additional activity and interaction between people. It often occurs
in small spaces through the precise positioning of an object or two around a key
location, such as a street corner, a bus stop, a newsstand. Such objects might serve a
necessary activity, or might simply engage or entertain the passer by. Alexander
explains how triangulation works, and also how it can create great public spaces.
QUOTABLE
In the past century, architecture has always been a minor science if it has been a
science at all. Present day architects who want to be scientific, try to incorporate the
ideas of physics, psychology, anthropology in their work . . . in the hope of keeping in
tune with the scientific times. I believe we are on the threshold of a new era, when
this relation between architecture and the physical sciences may be reversed when
the proper understanding of the deep questions of space, as they are embodied in
architecture will play a revolutionary role in the way we see the world and will do for
the world view of the 21st and 22nd centuries, what physics did for the 19th and
20th.

Every building, every room, every garden is better when all the patterns which it
needs are compressed as far as it is possible for them to be. The building will be
cheaper; the meaning in it will be denser.

Above all, the shapes of the building must spring from the land, and buildings
around, like a tree springing from a coppice it fits perfectly, the moment of
inception.

Good languages are in harmony with geography, climate and culture.

Ill tell you a story. I was in India in 1961. I was living in a village most of the time. I
studied that village, tried to understand what village life was all about. And I got back
to Harvard, a few months later, and I got a letter from the government of [the town
in India], saying Weve got to re-locate our village because of the dam construction.
Would you like to build it?. I think about 2000 people were being moved. And I
thought about it. And then I was very sad. And I wrote back, and I said, You know, I
dont know enough about how to do it. Because I dont want to come in and simply
build a village, because I dont think that will make life. I know that the life has got to
come from the people, as well as whats going on physically, geometrically. My
experience of living in the village is that I do not know enough about how to actually
make that happen. And therefore I very very regretfully decline your kind offer. And
I was actually chagrined beyond measure, that I had to give that reply. But it was
honest, and in fact, it was because of that letter that I wrote A Pattern Language.
Because, I thought and thought, and I said, You know, this is crazy. What would I
have to do, to put in peoples hands the thing with which they could do this, so that it
would be like a real village and not like an architects fantasy?

ACCOLADES
[Alexander is] one of the most influential people who has ever been in the design
world. His influence on us, operationally, has been enormous. Andres Duany,
Founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism

Alexanders approach presents a fundamental challenge to us and our style-

obsessed age. It suggests that a beautiful form can come about only through a
process that is meaningful to people. It also implies that certain types of processes,
regardless of when they occur or who does them, can lead to certain types of
forms. Thomas Fisher, Progressive Architecture
In these postmodern times of distortional post-structural theories and cynical
deconstructivist designs, Alexanders work is a beacon illuminating a way to make
the world more robust, beautiful, and kind this vision and work may well inspire a
new generation of practitioners and thinkers, and so a virtuous circle may
proceed. David Seamon, Professor in the Department of Architecture, Kansas
State University

Five hundred years is a long time, and I dont expect many of the people I interview
will be known in the year 2500. Christopher Alexander may be an exception.
David Creelman, Editor of HR Magazine

[Alexander] is single-handedly trying to destroy the trillion dollar construction

industry. Joel Garreau, Author of Edge City: Life on the New Frontier