Christopher

alexander
3.Aishwarya saji
About
christopher alexander
● Christopher Wolfgang Alexander (October 4 1936, Vienna)
● a British-American architect and design​ theorist
● currently 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, sociology and others.
● Alexander has designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general
contractor.
● 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 is controversial among some mainstream architects and critics, in part because his work is
often harshly critical of much of contemporary architectural theory and practice.​
Book: A Pattern Language:
Towns, Building and
Construction (1977),
About
the book
● In this book, Alexander’s writing is guided by the central thesis that there are unconscious patterns
by which human beings identify and live in space and these relationships can be discerned and be
brought into the conscious realm.
● In this book Alexander and his colleagues provide 253 patterns that describe a range of environments
ranging from living areas to kitchens, to bathrooms, to secret alcoves, to stair cases, to work places, to
neighbourhoods, to ideal universities, to planned pathways.
● “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then
describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million
times over, without ever doing it the same way twice”
● patterns ensures that all forces are balanced in a way that facilitates the emergence of ‘quality without
a name'.
● In order to enable this synthesis, each pattern in the language follows a consistent format of five
sections. First is its identification, including name, number, confidence rating, and a photograph of a
typical example. Second is a list of connections to other patterns it helps to complete. The third section
comprises a description of the context in which the pattern is relevant , fourth section prescribes and
diagrams the actions required to ensure the emergence of the ‘quality without a name’ and the final
section is a list of other patterns that help to complete it.
● The primary goal of the book is to provide a practical language that enables everyday users to
become conscious of their living patterns. In so doing, they could be encouraged to create and improve
their own houses, streets and communities and thus become an integral part of the design process,
blurring the boundary between professional designers and everyday users.
● A Pattern Language, however, also develops a much broader philosophical critique of the modern
alienated condition. The book argues for an ideal balance between work and family life, suitable public
institutions, mixed use in neighbourhoods, and rich public spaces for carnivals and other expressions
of irrationality.
● According to Alexander, in rich community-oriented settings, spaces transform from being merely
functional to being social, and in such social settings there exist possibilities for spatial, emotional, and
affective learning and cognition.
● A Pattern Language consists of suggestive diagrams (patterns) that, in built form encourage
interaction between people and their environments at multiple levels. Descriptions of patterns
discuss how to transform a specific space from being merely functional to being social, interactive and
vital.
● He believes that such patterns can never be created by centralized authority, or bylaws, or by master
plans. They emerge gradually if these patterns are followed at lowest level of implementation and
every building takes responsibility to shape the small corner it has and hence contributing to the
change in world and setting the space into a pattern with the rest of the space.
● The author talks about regions made of hierarchy of social and political groups, from smallest most
local group to large groups.
Small Groups: - Families, Work Groups, Neighbours etc.
Large groups: - City Councils, Regional assemblies etc.
● Each of the group modifies the environment it shares with others according to them and hence a
pattern language is developed.
Christopher alexander has proposed 3 theories of urban
design
● Christopher Alexander has sought to understand and make a particular manner of order that he calls
wholeness, which, whether in natural or human-made settings, is the “source of coherence in any part of
the world”
● Alexander contends that, when actualized appropriately, wholeness offers a sense of harmony that “fills
and touches us”
● More so, wherever there is wholeness, there is life, which involves such qualities as good health (e.g., a
flourishing wetland), enjoyment (e.g., a robust urban neighborhood), handsomeness (e.g., a well-crafted
door), or beauty (e.g., an elegant glazed bowl, a fine oil painting, or a splendid soaring cathedral)
● Alexander’s first book , efforts to understand wholeness were The Timeless Way of Building (1979), and
A Pattern Language (1977),
● His design process incorporates two parts. First, as summarized, he identified a set of 15 geometric
properties that he claimed reoccur in all things
/ FIRST THEORY:

● The inspiration for this work is the belief that the buildings of traditional societies are
inherently more beautiful than contemporary architecture.
● Traditional buildings -product of a communally-shared value system and adaptation to
changing circumstances which brings all the ‘forces’ impacting a design into a harmonious
balance.
● In contrast, contemporary architecture results from the imposition of formal rules and
abstract concepts upon a single design episode, creating an outcome where the ‘forces’ are
unbalanced.
● solution to this problem was a complex mathematical method for balancing all the ‘forces’
impacting a design-but this process turned out to be more demanding
● However, Alexander also discovered that particular group of ‘forces’ encapsulated generic
situations that occurred repeatedly throughout the built environment, and that resolving
these forces would yield generic solutions that could be adapted to an infinite variety of
specific circumstances
 SECOND THEORY

● Alexander’s second theory of architecture, which again focused on the inherent beauty of traditional urban
spaces and buildings.
● Alexander’s second theory, was a collaborative process, was developed across three canonical books; The
Oregon Experiment , A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building
● He states “there is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or
a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named”
● The first volume of Alexander’s theory—The Timeless Way of Building—details his belief that this unnamed
quality is the source of the inherent beauty of traditional architecture.
● it is argued that the shared values and customs of traditional societies provide a guiding framework, or design
language, that restrains the many small acts of individual construction and integrates them into a larger
cohesive environment
● Despite being unnamed, Alexander proposed several descriptors for this quality—‘beauty’, ‘alive’, ‘whole’,
‘comfortable’, ‘free’, ‘exact’, ‘egoless’, and ‘eternal’
● Alexander argues that this quality exists, to some extent, in every individual, and this allows us to recognise its
presence in the environment and each other.
● Alexander’s second theory of architecture is that a strong reciprocal relationship exists between environments
and their inhabitants. The theory states that places which exhibit this quality will awaken it in people, and
people who have found the quality will embed it into the places they help to create. Both people and places will
become healthy, alive, whole, and self-maintaining if they have the ‘quality without a name’ and will be ‘sick’,
‘dead’, un-whole, and self-destroying without it.
● ‘quality without a name’ is only created when an ‘activated populace’ participate in shaping their
environment through a democratic process based on common traditions, a shared design language
and a society-wide dialogue.
● Alexander also argues that the traditional languages and values that once guided this process have
been lost over time, or corrupted . Therefore, in order to address this issue, he provided a replacement
design language which forms the functional basis of Alexander’s theory in A Pattern Language.

THIRD THEORY
Ultimately Alexander rejected his second theory of architectural beauty- as he felt it had too little
generative power and too little focus on geometry.
Three decades later he proposed a ‘third theory’ of beauty, which replaced patterns with the generic
concept of ‘centres’ and their transformations, in addition to removing much of the neatly packaged
social and architectural content that makes his second theory so compelling