Christopher Alexander

Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander (4 October 1936 – 17 March 2022) was an Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist.

He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology.

Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor.

In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of the pattern language movement.

The first wiki—the technology behind Wikipedia—led directly from Alexander's work, according to its creator, Ward Cunningham.

Alexander's work has also influenced the development of agile software development.

In architecture, Alexander's work is used by a number of different contemporary architectural communities of practice, including the New Urbanist movement, to help people to reclaim control over their own built environment.

However, Alexander was controversial among some mainstream architects and critics, in part because his work was often harshly critical of much of contemporary architectural theory and practice.

As a young child Alexander emigrated in fall 1938 with his parents from Austria to England, when his parents were forced to flee the Nazi regime.

(They worked as German language teachers. ) He spent much of his childhood in Chichester and Oxford, England, where he began his education in the sciences.

In 1954, he was awarded the top open scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, 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 PhD in Architecture ever awarded at Harvard University).

He moved from England to the United States in 1958 to study at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Alexander was elected to the Society of Fellows, Harvard University 1961–64; awarded the First Medal for Research by the American Institute of Architects, 1972; elected member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Arts, 1980; winner of the Best Building in Japan award, 1985; winner of the ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) Distinguished Professor Award, 1986 and 1987; invited to present the Louis Kahn Memorial Lecture, 1992; elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1996; one of the two inaugural recipients of the Athena Medal, given by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), 2006;.

His dissertation "The Synthesis of Form: Some Notes on a Theory" was completed in 1962.

He was elected fellow at Harvard.

During the same period he worked at MIT in transportation theory and computer science, and worked at Harvard in cognition and cognitive studies.

He moved to Berkeley, California in 1963 to accept an appointment as Professor of Architecture, a position he would hold for almost 40 years.

Alexander is best known for his 1977 book A Pattern Language, a perennial seller some four decades after publication.

Reasoning that users are more sensitive to their needs than any architect could be, he collaborated with his students Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid King, and Shlomo Angel to produce a pattern language that would empower anyone to design and build at any scale.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977), co-authored with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, 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 had its beginnings with an early version of Alexander's PhD dissertation based on fieldwork in the Bavra village in Gujarat, India.

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.

The Timeless Way of Building (1979) described the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire:

"There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are."

In 2002, after his retirement, Alexander moved to Arundel, England, where he continued to write, teach and build up to the time of his illness and death.

Alexander was married to Margaret Moore Alexander, and he had two daughters, Sophie and Lily, by his former wife Pamela Patrick.

Alexander Held both British and American citizenship.

On 17 March 2022, Alexander died peacefully in his home in Binsted, near Arundel, United Kingdom, following a long illness.

The immediate cause was pneumonia, according to Margaret Moore.

Alexander attended the Dragon School in Oxford and then Oundle School.

awarded (in absentia) the Vincent Scully Prize by the National Building Museum, 2009; awarded the lifetime achievement award by the Urban Design Group, 2011; winner of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, 2014 and 1994 Seaside Prize recipient.

His other books include Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A City is Not a Tree (first published as a paper and re-published in book form in 2015), The Timeless Way of Building, A New Theory of Urban Design, and The Oregon Experiment. More recently he published the four-volume The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, about his newer theories of "morphogenetic" processes, and The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth, about the implementation of his theories in a large building project in Japan.

Alexander was born in Vienna, Austria.

His father, Ferdinand Johann Alfred Alexander, was Catholic and his mother, Lilly Edith Elizabeth (Deutsch) Alexander was Jewish.