Editing Christopher Alexander (section)

===Author===
''[[The Timeless Way of Building]]'' (1979) described the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire:<ref>Alexander, C. (1979) ''[[The Timeless Way of Building]]'', Oxford University Press, p.7</ref> 
{{blockquote|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.}}

''[[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.<ref name="Alexander-1977"/> The book had its beginnings with an early version of Alexander's PhD dissertation based on fieldwork in the Bavra village in Gujarat, India.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Davis |first=Howard |url=https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003187516 |title=Early and Unpublished Writings of Christopher Alexander: Thinking, Building, Writing |date=2022-06-28 |publisher=Routledge |isbn=978-1-003-18751-6 |edition=1 |location=London |language=en |doi=10.4324/9781003187516-2}}</ref>

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. A notable value is that the architectural system consists only of classic patterns tested in the real world and reviewed by multiple architects for beauty and practicality.<ref name="Alexander-1977"/>

The book includes all needed surveying and structural calculations, and a novel simplified building system that copes with regional shortages of wood and steel, uses easily stored inexpensive materials, and produces long-lasting classic buildings with small amounts of materials, design and labor. It first has users prototype a structure on-site in temporary materials. Once accepted, these are finished by filling them with very-low-density concrete. It uses [[Vault (architecture)|vaulted]] construction to build as high as three stories, permitting very high densities.<ref name="Alexander-1977"/>

This book's method was adopted by the [[University of Oregon]] as described in ''[[The Oregon Experiment]]'' (1975), and remains the official planning instrument.<ref name="OregonEx"/> It has also been adopted in part by some cities as a building code.

The idea of a [[pattern language]] appears to apply to any complex engineering task, and has been applied to some of them. It has been especially influential in software engineering where [[Design pattern (computer science)|patterns]] have been used to document collective knowledge in the field.<ref>{{Cite book |title=Euro-Par 2000 parallel processing: 6th International Euro-Par Conference, Munich, Germany, August 29 - September 1, 2000 ; proceedings |date=2000 |publisher=Springer |isbn=978-3-540-67956-1 |editor-last=Bode |editor-first=Arndt |series=Lecture notes in computer science |location=Berlin Heidelberg}}</ref><ref>[http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/patterns/patterns Our Pattern Language] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170824182610/http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/patterns/patterns|date=2017-08-24}} An ongoing collaborative effort to construct a pattern language for parallel programming.</ref>

''A New Theory of Urban Design'' (1987) coincided with a renewal of interest in [[urbanism]] among architects, but stood apart from most other expressions of this by assuming a distinctly anti-masterplanning stance.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Dennis |first=Michael |date=2020-08-20 |title=A landmark work of architecture and urbanism |url=https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/20/landmark-work-architecture-and-urbanism |access-date=2023-06-29 |website=CNU |language=en}}</ref> An account of a design studio conducted with [[University of California Berkeley]] students on a site in San Francisco, it shows how convincing urban networks can be generated by requiring individual actors to respect only ''local'' rules, in relation to neighbours. A vastly undervalued part of the Alexander canon, ''A New Theory'' is important in understanding the generative processes which give rise to the [[shanty town]]s latterly championed by [[Stewart Brand]],<ref>See Chapter 2 of his ''Whole Earth Discipline'', 2009.</ref> [[Robert Neuwirth]],<ref>''Shadow Cities: a billion squatters, a new urban world'', 2004.</ref> and [[Charles III]], the then Prince of Wales (2001).<ref name="Hanson-Younés">See Brian Hanson & Samir Younés, "Reuniting Urban Form and Urban Process: The Prince of Wales's Urban Design Task Force", ''Journal of Urban Design'', v.6, no.2 (June 2001), pp.185–209; Charles, Prince of Wales, speech at the "Traditional Urbanism in Contemporary Practice" conference at The Prince's Foundation, London, 20 November 2003.</ref> There have been critical reconstructions of Alexander's design studio based on the theories put forward in ''A New Theory of Urban Design''.<ref name="Warped">{{cite journal |last1=Griffiths |first1=Gareth |date=2013 |url=https://www.academia.edu/7550339 |title=Warped educational strategies in simulation of practice |journal=Nordic Journal of Architectural Research |volume=1 |via=Academia.edu |access-date=6 February 2018}}</ref>

''[[The Nature of Order]]: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe'' (2003–04), which includes The ''Phenomenon of Life'', ''The Process of Creating Life'', ''A Vision of a Living World'' and ''The Luminous Ground'', is Alexander's most comprehensive and elaborate work.{{citation needed|date=March 2022}} In it, he put forth a new theory about the nature of space and described how this theory influences thinking about architecture, building, planning, and the way in which we view the world in general. The mostly static patterns from ''A Pattern Language'' were amended by more dynamic sequences, which describe how to work towards patterns (which can roughly be seen as the result of sequences). Sequences, like [[pattern language|patterns]], promise to be tools of wider scope than building (just as his theory of space goes beyond architecture).<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Dawes |first1=Michael J. |last2=Ostwald |first2=Michael J. |title=Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language: analysing, mapping and classifying the critical response |journal=City, Territory and Architecture |date=19 December 2017 |volume=4 |issue=1 |pages=17 |doi=10.1186/s40410-017-0073-1|s2cid=43774537 |doi-access=free}}</ref>

The online publication ''Katarxis 3'' (September 2004) includes several essays by Christopher Alexander, as well as a debate between Alexander and [[Peter Eisenman]] from 1982.<ref>{{Cite journal |url=http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm |title=Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture: The 1982 Debate Between Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman |journal=Kataraxis |volume=3 |access-date=2 December 2016}}</ref>

Alexander's final book published while he was alive, ''The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems'' (2012), is the story of the largest project he and his colleagues had ever tackled, the construction of a new High School/College campus in Japan. He also used the project to connect with themes in his four-volume series. He contrasted his approach, (System A) with the construction processes endemic in the U.S. and Japanese economies (System B). As Alexander describes it, System A is focused on enhancing the life/spirit of spaces within given constraints (land, budget, client needs, etc.) (drawings are sketches – decisions on placing buildings, materials used, finish and such are made in the field as construction proceeds, with adjustments as needed to meet overall budget); System B ignores, and tends to diminish or destroy that quality because there is an inherent flaw: System A is a generally a product of a different Economic System than we live in now.  When the architect is only responsible for concept and casual field drawings (which the builder uses to build structures at the lowest possible [competitive] cost), the builder finds that System A can not produce acceptable results at the lowest market cost. Except for a culture where land and material costs are low or first world clients who are sensitive, patient and wealthy. In most cases, the economically motivated builder must use a hybrid system. In the best case, System AB, the builder uses the processes of System A to differentiate, improve and inform his work. Or there are no economic considerations and the builder is the architect and is building for himself. In the last few chapters he described "centers" as a way of thinking about the connections among spaces, and about what brings more wholeness and life to a space.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Seamon |first1=David |last2=Stefanovic |first2=Ingrid |title=Christopher Alexander's "Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth" (2013) |url=https://www.academia.edu/2147246 |journal=Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology |volume=24 |date=Winter 2013}}</ref>