The world of architectural theory is in mourning after news that architect, urbanist, AIA Gold Medalist, and former UC Berkeley professor Christopher Alexander passed away peacefully in his home in the south of England Thursday following a long illness.
Alexander was a pioneering theorist and early proponent of the New Urbanism movement who authored several crucial texts including The Timeless Way of Building and 1973’s seminal A Pattern Language.
Born in Austria in 1936, Alexander read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge before immigrating to the United States to attend both MIT and Harvard in 1958. Alexander joined the faculty as Professor of Architecture at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design in 1963.
As a theorist, he was instrumental in developing still-used planning methods first published in The Oregon Experiment in 1975 and known for influencing the development of a software engineering concept that eventually led to Wikipedia. As an architect, he demonstrated a striving towards what he called "wholeness" using theories that were articulated in his 2012 work The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth and embodied in the designs for San Jose's Julian Street Inn supportive housing development and the Eishin School in Saitama Prefecture Japan.
Alexander’s life will be honored as part of the Congress for New Urbanism’s 30th annual conference from March 23rd to the 26th in Oklahoma City.
He is survived by his wife Maggie and daughters Lily and Sophie. Christopher Alexander was 85 years old.
13 Comments
RIP
Mr. Alexander was a brilliant theorist, and a gentile soul. He was a big influence on how I view my work. Ever since I read the transcript of his debate with Peter Eisenman in the early eighties, my outlook shifted. Rest In Peace.
A Pritzker Prize unforgivable omission. Chris Alexander is one of my architecture heroes; his work is now part of our collective understanding of the built environment.
RIP
Notes on the synthesis of form. A must-read.
Notes on the Synthesis of Form
A Pattern Language
The Timeless Way of Building
The Nature of Order
The debate between Peter Eisenman and Christopher Alexander - 1982
Contrasting Concepts of Harmony
RIP. So sad
I am holding A Pattern Language in my hands right now, as it is never far from my mind. Difficult to lose a true legend who has made such a broad impact on the profession and the public at large.
Alexander made major contributions--see my review in "Skyline" (February, 1980) in which I write, "The Pattern Language approach is nothing more or less than a way of making what we all know through common sense accessible to both architects and users. But in doing something so simple, it is absolutely revolutionary."
But I had also watched several years of students educated in the “design methodologies” which grew out of Alexander’s "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" graduate from school unable to design a building, indeed never having designed anything.
Alexander himself wrote, in his introduction to the paperback, “Indeed, since the book ["Notes on the Synthesis of Form"] was published, a whole academic field has grown up around the idea of ‘design methods’—-and I have been hailed as one of the leading exponents of these so called design methods. I am very sorry that this has happened, and want to state, publicly, that I reject the whole idea of design methods as a subject of study, since I think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from the practice of design.”
Alexanders later books, the four-volume "The Nature of Order" on morphology have yet to be absorbed, but may turn out to be as important as D'Arcy Thompson's great book.
You can find my "Skyline" review of the three Pattern Language books, plus my paper, “The Application of Systematic Methods to Designing,” in my book, "Notes on Architecture" by John Lobell.
I studies under you in Pratt, a course on Venturi and Kahn which did a lot to break the nonsensical indoctrination of modernism. I agree with your analysis of "the design method". It is common sense, something we all do when we simply organize our lives in a orderly and sometimes attractive way. Nice to hear from you!
Thanks for the thoughts -- good to hear from you (I will be teaching that course next fall).
I admire all his work. But mostly, he is to my knowledge the only person who has tried to develop a new theory of urban design (A New Theory of Urban Design (Center for Environmental Structure Series): Alexander, Christopher, Neis, Hajo, Anninou, Artemis, King, Ingrid: 9780195037531: Amazon.com: Books) that attempts to create urban places worth visiting, instead of the unbearably dreadful boredom of urban plans we have produced in the approx. last 100 years. He did not get there all the way (by his own admission), but he gave us all a start. We would be wise to continue his work. Because IMO, while we also need better buildings, especially in the west, we desperately need better cities.
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