In Book I, THE PHENOMENON OF LIFE, Christopher Alexander has offered a view of the natural and built worlds in which Order is seen as underlying all life, and life – visible as living structure – a common and necessary feature of buildings.
In Book 2, THE PROCESS OF CREATING LIFE, he has argued that it is a special kind of adaptive Process, not a mechanical or arbitrary application of properties, that creates life.
> Life in nature, and in the humanly constructed world, is generated by a process of unfolding in which Living Structure grows in stepwise fashion from a current condition (the system of Centers which exists) and takes on greater life by a series of structure-preserving transformations, or Adaptations.
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ALEXANDER, Christopher, 2002. The nature of order : an essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe. Berkeley, Calif: Center for Environmental Structure. Center for environmental structure series vol. 9-12. ISBN 0-9726529-0-6.
A contemporary account on Gatemaker can be found at gatemaker.org. A recent account was presented at the 2013 PUARL conference in Portland, Oregon and was pre-printed in RAIN Magazine in 2014 as "Gatemaker: Christopher Alexander's dialogue with the computer industry". site 