Christopher Wolfgang Alexander

born October 4, 1936 Vienna, Austria. noted : theories about design, building projects in California, Japan , mexico. now : University Of California , berkeley.

Alexander is often overlooked by texts in the history and theory of architecture because his work intentionally disregards contemporary architectural discourse. Works influence : Architecture , Religion , Computer Science. Active : 1960- present

Now working on : Sustainability and Morphogenesis

Alexander is also a prolific author and artist.

His unique combination of professional, scientific and handson disciplines have been the basis for his evolving understanding of a new scientific and empirical basis for judging, building, and modifying the quality of the environment.

The Timeless Way of Building (1979) described the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977) described a practical architectural system in a form that a theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar. A New Theory of Urban Design (1987) 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. The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (2003-4), which includes The Phenomenon of Life, The Process of Creating Life,A Vision of a Living World and The Luminous Ground, is Alexander's latest, and most comprehensive and elaborate work.

 1977 book on architecture, urban design, and community livability. Patterns describe a problem and then offer a solution. "All 253 patterns together form a language." In doing so the authors intend to give ordinary people, not only professionals, a way to work with their neighbours to improve a town or neighbourhood, design a house for themselves or work with colleagues to design an office, workshop or public building such as a school. The idea of a pattern language appears to apply to many complex engineering tasks. It has been especially influential in software engineering where design patterns have been used to document collective knowledge in the field

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

1979 proposes a new theory of architecture (and design in general) that relies on the understanding and configuration of design patterns

the concept of the "quality without a name", that we should seek to include this nameless quality in our buildings
define the idea by surrounding it with existing concepts that reflect a part of the quality with no name but are not sufficient to define it individually It is essentially the introduction to A Pattern Language and The Oregon Experiment, providing the philosophical background to the Center for Environmental Structure series. "a book on philosophy with architectural examples.

The Timeless Way of Building

Although humans often experience a large number of components or relationships as complexity, multiplicity does not automatically result in disorder. Neither does order naturally result from a small number of parts or relationships. It is not multiplicity that results in disorder but rather, an inability to comprehend an evolutionary, organizing, and explicative path of change from one arrangement to another and so forth and so on. Alexanders theory deals with the goal of correlating the principles and concepts of his treatise on living structure with the practice of modeling, analysis, and design of information systems. Although his central focus as an architect is on physical design as in building and construction, his theory goes to the heart of the process of creating systems that are effective and efficient.

a dynamic concept.