Christopher Alexander
English architect and professor at University of California, Berkley. A controversial but influential theorist, especially of urban design. Yet he has designed little and built even less, most seemingly unremarkable. Christopher Alexander coined the term “Pattern Language” to emphasize his belief that people had an innate ability for design that paralleled their ability to speak.
See also: Lifelong learning pattern map, Pattern form
Reading:
-
Alexander, C.
- (1964). Notes on the sythesis of form. Review.
- (1965). A city is not a tree. Full text.
- with Jacobson, M., Fiksdahl-King, I., & Angel, S. (1977). A pattern language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Here he presents 253 individual patterns that go into the making of successful towns and building (in the context of a North American environment). It is about buildings in the larger context of an all-encompassing theory of life based on organic wholeness, scalablity, self-sustaining systems. Very readable. website.
- (1979). Timeless way of building. The most instructive in describing his notion of pattern language and its application to designing an building buildings and towns.
- (2002). The nature of order. website
-
Kohn, W. (2002). The lost prophet of architecture. The Wilson Quarterly, summer 2002. She askes why is that Alexander’s colleagues in the American architectural establishment would have nothing to do with him: ”…the simultaneously intimate and all-knowing tone of his writing (that) sounds unbearably condescending to practitioners who take pride in having invented some of their own solutions to the problems of architecture.” Kohn also asserted that Alexander’s commitment to absolute certainty had led critics to dismiss him as “a utopian, a messianic crank, and contrarian who produces words instead of buildings.” online, via.
Acknowledgement: Photo of Christopher Alexander, 2004, by Maggie Moore. Building Living Neighbourhoods.
07 Jan 2006
