1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes

Christopher Wolfgang Alexander is a widely influential British-American architect and design theorist, and currently 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, sociology and others. Alexander has 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 is controversial among some mainstream architects and critics, in part because his work is often harshly critical of much of contemporary architectural theory and practice.Alexander is known for many books on the design and building process, including Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A City is Not a Tree , 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. All his works are developed or accumulated from his previous works, so his works should be read as a whole rather than fragmented pieces. His life's work or the best of his works is The Nature of Order on which he spent about 30 years, and the very first version of The Nature of Order was done in 1981, one year before this famous debate with Peter Eisenman in Harvard.

Alexander is perhaps 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 produced and validated a "pattern language" to empower anyone to design and build at any scale. Wikipedia  

✵ 4. October 1936
Christopher Alexander photo

Works

The Timeless Way of Building
The Timeless Way of Building
Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander: 6   quotes 0   likes

Famous Christopher Alexander Quotes

“In my life as an architect, I found that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low.”

Christopher Alexander

Source: Foreword to Richard P. Gabriel, Patterns of Software

“On the geometric level, we see certain physical elements repeated endlessly, combined in an almost endless variety of combinations… It is puzzling to realize that the elements, which seem like elementary building blocks, keep varying, and are different every time that they occur …. If the elements are different every time that they occur, evidently then, it cannot be the elements themselves which are repeating in a building or town; these so-called elements cannot be the ultimate "atomic" constituents of space.”

Christopher Alexander book The Timeless Way of Building

Cited in: Peter Coad (1992, p. 152)
The Timeless Way of Building (1979)

“Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there…. These patterns of events are locked in with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else; they [patterns in the space] are the atoms and molecules from which a building or a town is made.”

Christopher Alexander book The Timeless Way of Building

Cited in: Peter Coad (1992) " Object-oriented patterns http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse503/04sp/readings/designpattern.pdf." Communications of the ACM 35.9. p. 152
The Timeless Way of Building (1979)

“One begins to think with that new building block, rather than with littler pieces. And finally, the things which seem like elements dissolve, and leave a fabric of relationships behind, which is the stuff that actually repeats itself, and gives the structure to a building or a town.”

Christopher Alexander book The Timeless Way of Building

Cited in: Peter Coad (1992, p. 152) About what happens when one finds a pattern?
The Timeless Way of Building (1979)

“Look more carefully…to find out what it really is that is repeating there …. Beyond its elements, each building [or town] is defined by certain patterns of relationships among the elements…. These relationships are not extra, but necessary to the elements… The elements themselves are patterns of relationships.”

Christopher Alexander book The Timeless Way of Building

Cited in: Peter Coad (1992, p. 152) About To find patterns, what does one look for?
The Timeless Way of Building (1979)

“...the constitution of the universe may be such that the human self and the substance that things [are] made out of, the spatial matter or whatever you call it, are much more inextricably related than we realized.”

Christopher Alexander

Source: Debate with Peter Eisenman at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, 17 November 1982.

Similar authors

Bill Gates photo
Bill Gates 92
American business magnate and philanthropist
Rudolf Steiner photo
Rudolf Steiner 20
Austrian esotericist
Enrico Fermi photo
Enrico Fermi 9
Italian physicist
Jawaharlal Nehru photo
Jawaharlal Nehru 110
Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister …
Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis photo
Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis 26
Greek architect
Norman Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank photo
Jacques Herzog photo
Jacques Herzog 6
Swiss architect
Peter Cook photo
Peter Cook 45
British architect
Moshe Safdie photo
Moshe Safdie 2
Israeli-Canadian architect
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe photo
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 6
German architect