Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander (www.mediamatic.nl ) is an architect and professor emeritus at Cal Berkeley. He is very interested in design, and computer folks who read his books are always impressed by the parallels with designing software. He originated the patterns concept in the later 1960s and early '70s. In particular, a lot of the jargon we use when we are talking about patterns, such as "forces" and the distinction between problem and solution, come from his work.

Alexander has his own web site at www.PatternLanguage.com . Someone who knows how should really talk to his web guy about refactoring this site - very confusing... Yes, please, he has so many well-placed friends in the computer industry that someone must be able to help. I find it interesting that his wonderful sense of aesthetic completely falls down when he tries something outside of architecture. Does he realize that living patterns and dead patterns are present in web applications, too?

Another viewpoint: his website design demonstrates his methods better than most people think; it is quirky, inviting, and each small location gives the sense of being the center of the whole. There are no pages anywhere on the site that are simply "passageways" to other pages; each page is an end in itself. (It would be folly to think this content could be presented as well on a Jakob Nielsen-style website.) That said, Alexander's beautiful books accomplish the same thing but are successful in a way that his website is not. Surely a better site design is possible. The books would make a good starting point for analysis.

Alexander wrote a lot of good books including the indispensable:

A Pattern Language [ISBN 0195019199] - Summary descriptions at www.jacana.org.uk

The Timeless Way Of Building [ISBN 0195024028]

Notes On The Synthesis Of Form [ISBN 0674627512]

The Oregon Experiment [ISBN 0195018249]

And the very gorgeous

A Foreshadowing Twenty First Century Art [ISBN 0195208668] aka the Rug Book

As of June 6,2002 The first volume ofThe Nature Of Order was shipped with the rest in various stages of publishing. This series consists of four volumes:

Book 1:
The Phenomenon Of Life [ISBN 0195106393]

Book 2:
The Process Of Creating Life [ISBN 0972652922]

Book 3:
A Vision Of a Living World [ISBN 0972652930]

Book 4:
The Luminous Ground [ISBN 0972652949]

There is a discount order price available through Christopher Alexander's website at www.patternlanguage.com .

Latest book - 2012 - preview -> The Battle -> Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth

Doug Lea wrote a good review g.oswego.edu of Alexander's work from the point of view of Software Engineering. Gabriel's Patterns of Software also speaks of Alexander's impact on our industry.

Other Alexander related material includes:

Stewart Brand interviews Alexander in How Buildings Learn:
What happens to them after they're built.

SOME NOTES ON CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER. www.math.utsa.edu By Dr. Nikos Salingaros, mathematician and architectural theorist.

A critique www.gsd.harvard.edu

With which book is it best to start?

Of all the books I've read, the most comprehensive -- both for breadth and depth -- is Grabow's biography of Alexander. It's out-of-print and a bit hard to get, but you should be able to find it through a used book search. Grabow, Stephen. Christopher Alexander: The Search for a new Paradigm in Architecture. Stocksfield, UK: Oriel Press, 1983. If you click on the ISBN, you can give your coordinates to Amazon and they'll try to track it down for you. [ISBN 0-85362-199-3] -- Jim Coplien

I think The Timeless Way of Building makes a good start, though I haven't read the book Jim mentions. It seems worth mentioning this because I've noticed a lot of recommendations for A Pattern Language (outside the Wiki), which should be read after Timeless Way, rather than before or instead of. -- Luke Gorrie

The Timeless Way Of Building didn't make any sense to me until after I read A Pattern Language. People differ. -- Ralph Johnson

I read A Pattern Language first, too, and grokked it immediately. Later, I tried The Timeless Way Of Building, and found it repetitive and much harder going (more like other books by architects). The Oregon Experiment, however, is a nice introduction to the application of the patterns presented in A Pattern Language. Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn is also a nice introduction to Alexander's ideas (and my very first contact with those ideas). -- CMConnelly

I also began with the a Pattern Language, though not due to any deep thought or knowledge. For the last few years I have felt I somehow started at the wrong place, as Alexander himself recommends starting with the The Timeless Way Of Building. I finally bought the The Timeless Way Of Building, and to be honest, I am glad I started with Pattern Language. The two refer to each other, so there is no clear predecessor, but I found a Pattern Language more technical, and The Timeless Way Of Building perhaps a bit too lacking in detail for my needs -- Richard Yeo

One place to start is the video of a talk he gave at OOPSLA '96, "Patterns in Architecture." www.computerhistory.org <Broken Link> (Internet Archive web.archive.org ) It gives an overview of his work and his hopes, and then talks about the relation, or lack of relation, to software. See Software Patterns Arent Alexander Patterns. -- Steve Witham

Alexander Watch ...

Alexander was interviewed on the November 5th, 2000 program of Weekend Edition on NPR. See:
Public Radio Features Alexander.

Alexander was featured in the November 23rd, 2000, New York Times living section, available online with free registration. www.nytimes.com

An interesting article that ends on a sad note.

He gets a lot of play from the men. But have his methods been successful in real life?

Years ago Alexander said that, no, his methods were not working for other architects, even though the people applying his methods thought they had succeeded -- they were wrong (this is extremely ironic, since his older stuff is what has been most influential in software circles). He has been working since then on fixing that situation, with an emphasis on organic growth of architectures. Presumably it'll be several years after he finishes his current book series before we hear a strong update on that. (6/2004)

Article from a Wilson Quarterly article in 2002: www.wilsoncenter.org . Snagged this link from catarina.net's weblog. Article is a pretty critical summary of Alexander.

Comments on the article above: "Where does one begin to argue with that?" -- why do you always want to argue? Analytical thinking can help you a lot many times but you shouldn't expect to use analytical thinking all the time solving everything. Christopher Alexander emphasizes on wholeness. No any analytical thinking from a particular angle can grasp the wholeness. Only the human being, using the feels, can grasp the wholeness. So step back and use your feels about the wholeness, which you are actually using every day unconsciously. Christopher Alexander provided base for arguments in his book Nature of Order. (He said most people will be able to give the correct answer to various types of questions he asked.) If you want scientific argument, you can argue on these basis. Christopher Alexander's theory is indeed useful, in term of being applied to help people out in various domains, although CS people are still working hard to make it more useful through the patterns. -- Yuanliang Liu

I'd recommend The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs along with Alexander's books. [ISBN 067974195X]. Discussions of high traffic areas, social interactions and private vs. public spaces. What works vs. what is good or ideal - The book reminded me of similar discussions on this wiki in regard to building software. Frank Mc Geough

...found this behind the desk while cleaning...

Revision 137 made 11 months ago by c-24-62-25-242.hsd1.ma.comcast.net

If I could just quibble a tiny bit with this mostly accurate sketch, the application of Alexander's work to software was done virtually single-handedly by Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck. I know that Ward and Kent were committed to this in late 1987 and early 1988, during the formative years of On Technology, and they had each (separately) been discussing the ideas with me (I was doing research at Brown/IRIS at the time). The "object oriented" software community was small and very rarified at that time, and the Smalltalk community even more concentrated. Ward and Kent were very well known in that Smalltalk community, very highly regarded, and all of us paid a great deal of attention to their ideas and contributions. Many of us read Alexander's material, many of us saw the immediate application to object-oriented software - and Ward and Kent, virtually single-handedly, verbalized that abstract recognition into concrete, useful, and enormously influential pragmatics. I mean no criticism of any of the Gang Of Four, and their volume brought it to the larger software community. At the same time, I don't believe Alexander intended any insight into software design; that insight was almost entirely verbalized by Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck. -- Tom Stambaugh

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