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Christopher Alexander

wikipedia entry, Great Buildings.com

Links

Christopher Alexander is my guru in the proper sense of the word - the one who taught me, made me see how I wanted to learn to make buildings.

I was made aware of his work almost simultaneously in 1983 by a family friend, and by my then theory teacher at Manchester Poly School of Architecture, Joe Jessop (now head of the Manchester School of Architecture). It took a while before I paid much attention.

I was finally grabbed not by the book I was lent, The Timeless Way of Building, or by Joe's presentation of Alexander's work as a structuralist theory, but as with many other people, by reading his most famous and influential work A Pattern Language. Truly, this book set off fireworks in my mind. The book offers incredible empowerment to any designer prepared to take it seriously, and its methodology means so much more than the empty promises of other theoretical programmes - which are largely post rationalisations or academic exercises. The third book in the series The Oregon Experiment is equally impressive, being an account of the actual implementation of a pattern language approach at the scale of a university campus - the University of Oregon.

Frustrated as I was by the paucity of any kind of depth or sense of shared, connected character in the architectural languages and examples which were presented to me as current possibilites (early '80s), I fell on this book as a profoundly humane, rigourous attempt to develop a grounding for an architectural discourse which was rooted in reality, in human experience and characteristics. In fact, as it seems to me, the most complete attempt to carry forward the rationalist programme of modernism forwards, to actually take its polemic seriously, without regard for stylistic character.

Having attempted to use patterns in a couple of college projects, and taking Alexander's work as the central focus of my degree dissertation, I decided the only thing was to go and study with him in Berkeley, before taking my diploma course.