Christopher Alexander

Christo­pher Alexan­der is a con­tro­ver­sial but influ­en­tial the­o­rist, espe­cially of urban design. Argu­ing that clients should know more about the build­ings they need than do archi­tects, he pro­duced and val­i­dated with co-authors Sara Ishikawa and Mur­ray Sil­ver­stein a pat­tern lan­guage designed to empower any­one to design beau­ti­ful, func­tional and mean­ing­ful places. Sur­pris­ingly, he is hav­ing even more influ­ence in com­puter sci­ence than on archi­tec­ture. He is the father of the Pat­tern Lan­guage move­ment in com­puter science.

Read­ing List

• To read
• Rec­om­mended
• You have bet­ter things to do

• Alexan­der, C., and Cher­may­eff, S. (1963) Com­mu­nity and Pri­vacy: Toward a New Archi­tec­ture of Human­ism, advo­cates Lud­wig Hilberseimer’s de-urbanizing region­al­ism and low-rise hight-density housing.
• Alexan­der, C. (1964) Notes on the Syn­the­sis of Form. From the open­ing chap­ter: These notes are about the process of design: the process of invent­ing things which dis­play new phys­i­cal order, orga­ni­za­tion, form, in response to func­tion.
• Alexan­der, C. et al. (1975) The Ore­gon Exper­i­ment, which sets out a coop­er­a­tive plan­ning exper­i­ment for a 15,000-student campus.
• Alexan­der, C. (1977) A Pat­tern Lan­guage: Towns, Build­ings, Con­struc­tion. Con­sists of 253 design pre­cepts empow­er­ing clients to design for themselves.
• Alexan­der, C. (1979) The Time­less Way of Build­ing, in which he repu­di­ates the ratio­nal­ism he has pre­vi­ously advocated.
• Alexan­der, C. (1987) A New The­ory of Urban Design.