Everything about Christopher Alexander totally explained
Christopher Alexander (born
October 4,
1936 in
Vienna,
Austria) is an architect noted for his theories about design, and for more than 200 building projects in
California,
Japan,
Mexico and around the world. Reasoning that users know more about the buildings they need than any architect could, he produced and validated (in collaboration with
Sarah Ishikawa and
Murray Silverstein) a "
pattern language" designed to empower any human being to design and build at any scale. Alexander was a licensed contractor and architect in
England. In 1958 he moved to the United States, and has lived in
Berkeley, California from 1963 until the present. He is professor emeritus at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Education
Alexander grew up in England and started his education in sciences. In 1954, he was awarded the top open scholarship to
Trinity College,
Cambridge University 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 (the first
Ph.D. in Architecture ever awarded at
Harvard University), and was elected fellow at Harvard. During the same period he worked at MIT in transportation theory and in computer science, and worked at Harvard in cognition and cognitive studies. He became professor of Architecture at Berkeley in
1963, taught there continuously for 38 years, and is now Professor Emeritus at the University of California. He is widely recognized as the father of the pattern language movement in computer science. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 for his contributions to architecture.
Career
Writings
The Timeless Way of Building described the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire:
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction 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 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.
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 latest, and most comprehensive and elaborate work. In it, he puts forth a new theory about the nature of space and describes 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 have been amended by
more dynamic sequences, which describe how to work towards patterns (which can roughly be seen as the end result of sequences).
Sequences, like
patterns, promise to be tools of wider scope than building (just as his theory of space goes beyond architecture).
Architecture
Among Alexander's most notable built works are the
Eishin Campus near
Tokyo; the West Dean Visitors Centre in Sussex, England; the
Julian Street Inn (a homeless shelter) in
San Jose, California (both described in
Nature of Order); the
Martinez House (an experimental house in
Martinez, California made of lightweight concrete); and the low-cost housing in
Mexicali, Mexico (described in
The Production of Houses).
Influence
Computer Science
Alexander's
Notes on the Synthesis of Form was required reading for researchers in computer science throughout the 1960s.
Marvin Minsky, founder of
MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab, recommended it to students and colleagues. It had an influence in the 1960s and 1970s on
programming language design, modular programming,
object-oriented programming,
software engineering and other design methodologies. Alexander's mathematical concepts and orientation were similar to
Edsger Dijkstra's influential
A Discipline of Programming.
A Pattern Language‘s greatest influence in computer science is the
design patterns movement. Alexander's philosophy of incremental, organic, coherent design influenced also the
extreme programming movement. The
Wiki was invented to allow the
Hillside Group to work on
design patterns.
Will Wright wrote that Alexander's work was influential in the origin of
The Sims computer game, and in his current new work.
Religion
The fourth volume of
The Nature of Order approaches religious questions from a scientific rather than mystical direction. In it, Alexander describes deep ties between the nature of matter,
human perception of the universe, and the geometries people construct in buildings, cities, and artifacts, and he suggests a crucial link between traditional
beliefs and recent scientific advances.
Published works
Alexander's published works include:
Further Information
Get more info on 'Christopher Alexander'.
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