Christopher Alexander

13 Mar 1995 18:48

---

An architect, and a professor at U.C. Berkeley's school of architecture, who has strong, and rather peculiar, views about buildings and cities, which I'd like to understand better.

What do his buildings actually look like? Has he considered the environmental costs of many of his patterns, e.g., large amounts of open water in cities and fireplaces in every house?

See:
• Christopher Alexander
  • Notes on the Synthesis of Form [Uses some not-so-esoteric math, and some ideas from the early days of cybernetics. Compare Herbert Simon on design. Cf. biological order.]
  • A Pattern Language
• Hugh Kenner, ``Where Every Prospect Pleases'', in Mazes [Review of A Pattern Language, The Timeless Way of Building and The Oregon Experiment, which actually dares to be intelligently criticial, instead of either adulatory or dismissive.]

To read:
• The Timeless Way of Building
• The Oregon Experiment
• A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets
• The Nature of Order
• Wendy Kohn, ``The Lost Prophet of Architecture,'' The Wilson Quarterly, summer 2002 [online]
• Some links I've been led to via Rudy Zalesak, largely but not completely about adapting pattern languages to computer programming, a neat and obvious idea:
  • Patterns Home Page
  • Finding solutions through pattern languages
  • Pattern Languages of Program Design
• Richard Gabriel, Patterns of Software
• Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides, Design Patterns