Remembering Christopher Alexander

As a leading critic of the theory and praxis of mainstream post-war architecture, Christopher Alexander’s place in the history of design theory is clearly unconventional. As such, any recollection of his extensive career and influence must fall outside of the typical architectural obituary which tends to a) focus on the most iconic structures they designed and b) place them within an art-historical ‘arc’ narrative.

Christopher Alexander was born in Vienna in 1936 to a Catholic father and Jewish mother. The family emigrated to England following Anschluss. Alexander read a number of scientific subjects at Cambridge, culminating in a BSc in architecture and an MA in maths. In 1958, he moved to the US to study at Harvard (PhD in Architecture) and also work at M.I.T. (transportation theory, computer science, cognitive studies). On the strength of a prize-winning PhD thesis, in 1963 he was offered a tenure-track position as Professor of Architecture at Berkeley (where he remained until 2002).

Image courtesy of Center for Environmental Structure

Alexander produced an impressively but also forbiddingly broad body of work; formulating theories that drew on generative grammar, emergent complexity theory and multiple strands of cognitive and neurological research. This ferocious output and pugnacious attitude made him one of the greatest influences on most varieties of architectural thought and practice outside of the corporate-institutional mainstream. Equally, it won him relatively few friends within officialdom, academic management or the architectural profession.

Within the realm of architecture and built space, Alexander’s most recurring and insistent conviction was the centrality of the user/public in the design process; a highly democratic, virtually populist approach diametrically at odds with notions of talent, genius and top-down planning. He (in)famously wrote that “most of the wonderful places in the world were not made by architects but by the people.”

Another central concept was the search for evolutionarily and mathematically coherent patterns of qualities that could be observed from emergent built form and environment to replace what he perceived as arbitrary and poorly tested stylistic ideologies. He was particularly impatient with competing architectural theories based, in his estimation, on aphoristic verbiage that was not reflected in the built results.

This life-long search for empirical and practical justification and experimentation led to constant revisitation, modification and even wholesale reformulation of Alexander’s precepts. Thus, his Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1963 published version of his doctoral dissertation) was essentially countermanded or at least substantially modified in the essay A City Is Not a Tree (1965) which warned of the danger of oversimplification in the setting of urban design parameters.

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977) was part of a three-volume opus magnus and by far the best-selling and most prominent of Alexander’s works. In it, he and his co-authors tried to identify a number of patterns (design characteristics) that applied from the regional, city and neighbourhood level down to street, square, house and room. It continues to sell well but many do not realise that this, too, was in large part superseded by later work. Specifically, the four-volume The Nature of Order (2002-4), which grew out of Alexander’s dissatisfaction with the results of the application of the pattern language. In The Nature of Order, he attempted to dig deeper into the sort of knowledge that could be applied more rigorously and reliably across design briefs.

His frequent and detailed use of traditional, vernacular and historical structures and built space as examples of successful, sustainable design led critics to regard him as essentially regressive but the evidence of his work and thought is that it was subversive and forward looking, not least from an environmentalist and people-centred (as opposed to technology-centred) standpoint.

Eishin Campus, Central Hall. Image courtesy of Center for Environmental Structure

Alexander never reached the same prominence as a practising architect as he did as a theoretician, although he led over 200 distinct built projects. Some of these, such as the Eishin Campus, near Tokyo, were substantial works, yet the relative modesty of scale and cost of his built projects speak to his unconventional, almost counter-cultural approach and stance as well as to the humble, humanist, “small is beautiful” mentality of Alexander.

Christopher Alexander died in March 2022, having moved back to rural England following his retirement from academia.