Search Results - Alexander, Christopher

Christopher Alexander

Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander (4 October 1936 – 17 March 2022) was an Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist. He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology. Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor.

In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of the pattern language movement. The first wiki—the technology behind Wikipedia—led directly from Alexander's work, according to its creator, Ward Cunningham. Alexander's work has also influenced the development of agile software development.

In architecture, Alexander's work is used by a number of different contemporary architectural communities of practice, including the New Urbanist movement, to help people to reclaim control over their own built environment. However, Alexander was controversial among some mainstream architects and critics, in part because his work was often harshly critical of much of contemporary architectural theory and practice.

Alexander is best known for his 1977 book ''A Pattern Language,'' a perennial seller some four decades after publication. Reasoning that users are more sensitive to their needs than any architect could be, he collaborated with his students Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid King, and Shlomo Angel to produce a pattern language that would empower anyone to design and build at any scale.

His other books include ''Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A City is Not a Tree'' (first published as a paper and re-published in book form in 2015), ''The Timeless Way of Building, A New Theory of Urban Design,'' and ''The Oregon Experiment.'' More recently he published the four-volume ''The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe,'' about his newer theories of "morphogenetic" processes, and ''The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth'', about the implementation of his theories in a large building project in Japan. Provided by Wikipedia