“The hotel in which I was staying was remodelled by a French star designer whose work I do not know because I am not interested in trendy design. But from the moment I entered the hotel, the atmosphere created by his architecture began to take effect. Artificial light illuminated the hall like a stage. Abundant muted light. Bright accents on the reception desks, different kinds of natural stone in niches in the wall. People ascending the graceful stairway to the encircling gallery stood out against a shining golden wall. Above, one could sit in one of the dress circle boxes overlooking the hall and have a drink or a snack. There are only good seats here. Christopher Alexander, who speaks in Pattern Language of spatial situations in which people instinctively feel good, would have been pleased. I sat in a box overlooking the hall, a spectator, feeling that I was part of the designer's stage set. I liked looking down on the activity below where people came and went, entered and exited. I felt I understood why the architect is so successful.”1

An encounter in England

On a country estate in the South of England that once belonged to Edward James, the artist and patron of surrealism, one finds a number of architectural curiosities. The first is the Weald & Downland Living Museum, an open-air museum of rural buildings rescued from elsewhere in South-East England, comparable to Ballenberg at Switzerland. In 1967, James gave part of his estate at a peppercorn rent to Roy Armstrong and his association for the project. This resettled constellation consists of around fifty, mostly timber-framed buildings that faced demolition as a result of the demands of modern development. Mercifully free from signage, today the buildings stand in a slightly theatrical but lively arrangement, forming loose clusters and suggestions of public space, while others are set along a network of paths. Inside the houses, volunteers demonstrate various traditional crafts, and in one, an open fire built on a bed of tiles in middle of the room is tended to. Other houses, set apart on the hillside are more settled in their gardens and the site has the qualities typical of the English approach to landscape management, gently intervening but otherwise letting nature take its course.

n the other side of the road, on the main estate, one finds a building made of massive flint and red brick, with arched timber windows like thistles, painted white. A low, curved wall leads you to the entrance along a path among a small orchard. Its steep, clay-tiled roof is adorned with two small horse figures, the dining room inside is lofty, light and yet heavy with piers and arches that frame views out to the fields beyond.  You might think this was built in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Its strange yet familiar character means that even looking closely you would find it hard to place. This building, the West Dean Visitor Centre, something like a cross between a barn and a Viennese café, was in fact built in 1996 by Christopher Alexander, who oversaw it emerge from the site, adjusting it in the process. It was in this part of the world, West Sussex, where he grew up, and where he returned to later in life for a peaceful existence in an old farmhouse with a meadow, in the countryside near Arundel.

Architecture as Environment

In 1967, as the first buildings were arriving at the open-air museum in Sussex, Alexander was in California. Thirty-one years old, and already four years on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, he was founding The Center for Environmental Structure (CES), a non-profit to serve as a satellite of his chair, eventually becoming a research institute, publisher, architectural practice, general contractor and experimental workshop all in one. In its hybrid form, it anticipates more contemporary models rethinking what architecture practice might involve. Recruited to Berkeley by William Wurster in 1963, Alexander was one of a generation of Europeans at the department, including Sim Van der Ryn, an early ecological thinker, Horst Rittel, a design methods theorist who arrived from the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, and the architectural historian Spiro Kostof. In 1959 Wurster had persuaded the University to reform the school of architecture as the College of Environmental Design, the first school in the United States to unite architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, and design. ‘Environmental’, in this sense, of course meant something closer to Umwelt, rather than ‘ecological’. And when Alexander named CES in 1967, he kept ‘environmental’ but shifted the emphasis, from design to structure.

Alexander wasn’t really at all like a typical architect trained in the late 1950s. He was never fully initiated into the discipline of drawing or of thinking like an architect but approached sideways as a mathematical prodigy. He gravitated immediately towards research, and spent no significant time, as far I can tell, in any architect’s office. No love for neatness or orderliness; no coveted design objects; no love for clarity, abstraction, or pure forms—except perhaps in thought.

The geography of his life is complex but significant, part of the upheaval and energies of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna in 1936, when he was an infant his family fled to England and this was where he grew up. His parents were archaeologists and taught History and German at schools, including the Dragon School in Oxford, where Alexander was a pupil was and likely taught science by Gerd Sommerhof, a German theoretical biologist and who had studied at ETH Zurich, and later published works including, Life, Brain and Consciousness (1990). Alexander was bright and propelled himself by winning scholarships to Oundle (a leading public school), Cambridge and finally Harvard for his doctoral studies.

Instead of a talent for design or drawing, Alexander’s upwards trajectory was the result of the very brilliance of his mind and energy for writing: an intellectual collaborator, aware of modern architecture’s paradoxical lack of a rational, scientific grounding, despite its rational, visual logic. He was helped by Leslie Martin and tutored by Colin St John Wilson at Cambridge and later mentored by Serge Chermayeff at Harvard, with whom he co-authored his first published book, Community and Privacy, in 1963, the same year he moved to Berkeley.

In 1964, Harvard published his revised doctoral thesis as Notes on the Synthesis of Form.A Starting from first principles, its thesis was driven by a scientist’s desire to establish a rational basis for design and architecture, asking how one might conceive of the countless factors that are at play in any given situation, and therefore have to be resolved in the eventual form of what results, be it a spoon or—as in his main case study—a village, inspired by his field trip to Bavra,B India in 1962.

Despite all the analysis, diagrams and mathematical techniques that were to inspire the nascent design methods movement and early use of computers in design, his work was already being guided by an unshakeable insight that modernity, in his words, ‘self-conscious society’, not only threatened the destruction of traditional buildings and environments, but through its over-professionalisation, industrialisation and modern, machine-like modes of planning and making represented a loss of the very knowledge of how such things are made in the first place, and that these modern ways making were so opposed to the existing structure and everyday life in most places in the world. Alexander wrote as if it was architects who had caused all this, rather than being themselves shaped by larger historical forces. His view, however, like Bernard Rudofsky’s more tempered admiration in Architecture without Architects, also published in 1964, was that older buildings and environments were in fact more sophisticated and well-adapted to place and to their inhabitants than most modern ones (especially in the ordinary built environment).

Of course, he wasn’t the only architect who diagnosed the ill-effects of postwar planning, especially its housing, or sought to reform modernism, or reconnect it with older continuities, historical understanding and human empathy. Alexander’s singular approach, however, meant he didn’t build upon these other critiques, or even acknowledge them, and in his writing makes little sympathetic reference to any architect, living or dead; something that was apparently an unspoken principle in his research group. To take just one example of similar sentiments from the generation before, Alison and Peter Smithson’s essay “Urban Re-identification”2touches upon this alienation Alexander recognised a decade or two later. They begin: “The task of our generation is plain—we must re-identify man with his house, his community, his city”; on the following page we find a photograph of a farmhouse in the English Lake District, as a “home for oneself in nature”, asking rhetorically, “is your home just what you would build?” And further in, there’s a meditation on the in-between spaces in suburban housing: “How many gardens in your street are gardened for other reasons than that of keeping up ‘appearances’, and for how many is the possession of a garden at all not a personal solution but the only known answer for a civilised existence.”

If you read Alexander, it is clear his concern is not architecture per se, but the environment as a whole. Certainly he had no special regard for architecture as a separate intellectual tradition, whose focus is the artefact, discipline, and instrument of the drawing—Alexander’s appreciation of architecture is more one of Baukunst, the art of building, and his theoretical focus the very act of making things, and a close attention to effect buildings and environments have on people, with an artist’s heightened sensitivity for such things.

For Alexander, this sense of the built environment had clearly been part of what drew him to architecture in the first place. This appreciation for old places, their conviviality and feeling was fundamentally European, but also English in particular; the imprint of the places where he spent his formative years. Another insight of his was that the qualities of these places weren’t simply a result of their age, but a result of the kind of processes by which they were made. This understanding of process, echoed concerns of John Ruskin3 and William Morris. It was Ruskin who thought that the quality of a building was inseparable from the freedom of the labour that produced it, that roughness was the sign of human presence—which is structurally identical to Alexander’s insistence that living quality depends on a process allowing judgement at the point of making.4  

A Pattern Language

Co-authored with his colleagues Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein with Max Jacobsen, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Schlomo Angel,[4] A Pattern Language (1977) was the result of eight years’ research. It represents a particular attitude towards architectural knowledge, in that it sought to make it available and useable to anyone, not just architects. And it was driven by the question of what is it that makes a humane environment, from the large scale to the small, formulated as individual patterns, which brought together form a language.

Pattern languages were always present in Alexander’s building projects, in that they were used, as a participative tool, to establish the kinds of things that were going to be achieved in the project—not the programme, but qualitative and functional aspects at all scales; whether its relationship to the site, the kind of spaces formed in-between buildings, and features that often related to local culture. These languages, which were documents that could be shared, grew out of intensive interviews with users, to try to understand their collective dreams and practical concerns.

Part of the success of Alexander’s booksC is how carefully they are considered as artefacts. Although Alexander was deeply involved in the design of the books, two designers were also credited: book design by Harlean Richardson (1937–2019) and jacket design by Sigrid Spaeth (1936–1996), who was an artist in her own right, but also known as Saul Steinberg’s long-term partner. It is only the jacket that has any biographical information, which I suspect is part of the reason why the books have a life of their own, separate from the rest of the work.

There was also a collaboration of sorts in Herman Czech’s translation of the Pattern Language into German as Eine Mustersprache, which helped the reception of the work in the German-speaking world.5 Czech himself regarded Alexander’s work as being “the most comprehensive contemporary approach to advancing the field of building.” A Timeless Way of Building was never translated into German, perhaps reflecting the difficulties and effort involved in the first translation.

Alongside a decided lack of architectural references—The Timeless Way of Building is in fact consciously written as an original work of philosophy, with no footnotes, captions or references of any kind—photographs are used in Alexander’s books in an unusual, didactic manner. They are used to build an argument and to convey feeling, not entirely nostalgic. Taken from newspapers and books, the monochrome image renders everything as a pattern of light and shade, and more easily reveals the unity of the world, where colours might stand out or recede. The photographs are usually presented full bleed, out of context, out of time (timeless). Uncaptioned, with a copyright credit where possible but no further explanation in the end papers. Disproving Susan Sontag’s critique in On Photography that photographers inadvertently make the inanimate animate, and the animate inanimate (humans like objects and objects like humans), Alexander’s choice of photographs seeks to reveal the world as animate.

It is the utopian quality of the books that strikes a chord with so many people. Not simply accepting the world as it is, but imagining how it might be, most powerfully conveying a sense that the future could still be human. In some ways, it is astonishing he was able to build what he did at all; his tenured position at Berkeley and the influence of the books meant his ideas reached sympathetic readers around the world. In the radical 1960s California, people were busy reinventing civilisation, deeply influenced by other philosophies, including Zen Buddhism.[2] The English scholar was unleashed by a new freedom. It has been with Silicon Valley folk, and computer programmers in general, that Alexander has had an outsized impact. Stewart Brand, the seminal Silicon Valley figure and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog (1968–71) remarked, “A Pattern Language, in content and form, may be the most useful revolutionary book ever written.”

Built Experiments

Alexander is hard to neatly pigeonhole, partly because he built almost as much as he wrote. The building projects were experiments directly related to and entangled with the theory. Already in the late 1960s, through CES he was able to realise a number of building projects, most notably in the context of the United Nation’s Experimental Housing Project (PREVI) in Lima, Peru. The programme invited a number of international teams to work on adjacent plots, with CES working alongside architects including James Stirling, Atelier 5, Aldo van Eyck, Charles Correa and Fumihiko Maki. The results of CES’s proposals and eventual built project were published by CES in 1969 as Houses Generated by Patterns, documenting the patterns involved in the housing, reflecting the culture of Peruvian society as well as novel construction techniques.

The building projects began in earnest in the mid-1970s. Notable projects include a self-build project for a community in MexicaliD (1975–76), the Linz Café (1980) a temporary timber building at the Linz Forum, the Eishin school campus near Tokyo (1982–86), a homeless shelter in San José, the West Dean Visitor Centre (1994–96) in West Sussex, along with many private houses, and larger unbuilt schemes including the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, and for housing projects in many different contexts around the world, including Japan, Columbia, Israel and Germany.

By the 1980s, CES was operating out of a self-built set of studio buildings on a hillside in Martinez, north of Berkeley. Largely made from sprayed concrete, they were painted blue and white, and included, tile-making and carpentry workshops. Alexander proposed a different role for the architect, calling for a return to something more akin to a master builder overseeing the building on site, working with other tradespeople, guiding the building it as it emerges, through models and 1:1 mock-ups, adjusting and inventing things in situ rather than following a drawing to the nearest millimetre.

Perhaps uniquely for an architect, Alexander had a distrust of drawings (and images) as tools for making judgements about built reality. He also advocated for a broader empowerment of people everywhere in the making of their environments,6 not as mere “participation”, but the recognition that the act of building (and making, more generally) is a fundamental part of being human. What was so radical about Alexander was that he was willing to ask what would be necessary to be able to make possible, follow the consequences of this in his theory and practice, challenging the role of the drawing, the contract, and typical ways of managing finance in the building process.

This all came to a head most prominently at Eishin, a project for a school campus outside of Tokyo, which had to unite his unusual way of building and designing with the operation of a large building contractor. The largest of their realised projects, they were approached by Hisai Hosoi, the headmaster of a school that was due to relocate to a new site, and was inspired by reading CES’s 1975 book, The Oregon Experiment, which described the participatory planning process of a university campus.

Working with the staff and pupils, and with the site itself—a tea plantation—CES developed a pattern language for the project (the short version is 144 pages), and through large-scale models, and a process of staking flags in the ground, developed an arrangement of classroom buildings, forming streets and squares, a boating lake, along with several larger buildings including a great hall, judo hall, dining hall and gymnasium, the largest timber frame building made in Japan since the war.

A Way of Seeing

There is a thread running through Alexander’s work from his very first publication to his last, and it is not patterns, systems, participation, or geometry. It is a way of seeing that you could characterise as the perception of the relations between things, of wholes or Gestalt. His first published paper, “Perception and Modular Coordination” (1959), written at twenty-two while still a student at Cambridge, is about how the eye encounters built form.7 “A Result in Visual Aesthetics” appeared in the British Journal of Psychology; “The Origin of Creative Power in Children” in the British Journal of Aesthetics—not architecture journals, but journals of perception and aesthetic response.8 Before he arrived at the engineering laboratories at MIT, he was a research associate at Jerome Bruner’s Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard, where the work was about how human beings learn to see. And in 1964, the same year he published Notes on the Synthesis of Form—the book taken as his rationalist manifesto—he co-authored a paper called “On Changing the Way People See.”9 Looking at people’s capacities for seeing patterns holistically, rather than analytically.

In his later work, this is revealed in the nature of the patterns—which aren’t tables of dimensions like Neufert—but rather descriptions of fields of relations, that are interrelated with other patterns, and most comprehensively in The Nature of Order,10 which sought to describe as clearly as possible, what this life in the world was made of—the pattern of patterns.

In the patterns, presented in A Pattern Language,  we find whole sets of this inbetweenness—situations without clear names: positive outdoor space, entrance transition, hierarchy of open space, entrance room, the flow through rooms, short passage, staircase as a stage, tapestry of light and dark, sitting circle. There is another sequence relating to gardens and outdoor spaces that is particularly revealing: tree places, garden growing wild, garden wall, trellised walk, greenhouse, garden seat, front door bench, sitting wall, raised flowers, climbing plants, paving with cracks between the stones.

This is a way of looking at the world that is made not primarily of things, but of relations. Alexander’s appreciation of the everyday environment, profound objects and works of art and the ordinary sweetness of the world is no mere sentimentality but grounded in this form of perception. This is similar to the painter, who is encouraged to look at the world with a loose, open gaze, and to be receptive to the shapes that are formed in the visual field as they really appear—not the accumulation of things we have names for.11

More recently, the writing of neurologist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist has provided a framework that, without reference to Alexander or even architecture, helps illuminate Alexander’s project from above.12 McGilchrist’s work, which synthesises whole fields of neurological research. Very crudely put, he shows how the two hemispheres of the brain attends to the world in fundamentally different ways, the left categorising and controlling, the right perceiving wholes, relations, and living context. And how the balance between the two can change, both in individuals and in our culture over time. This duality maps with striking precision onto the distinction Alexander spent his life articulating: between environments that are alive and environments that are dead, between building as process and building as predetermined design. Alexander was describing his overwhelmingly right-hemisphere-dominant way of seeing, and struggling to capture it, by virtue of his attempts to describe it coherently and systematically in mostly left-hemisphere language. The Timeless Way on the other hand is consciously poetic, acknowledging the limits of language.

Our divided mind, and the effects of dominance on one side, incidentally, is echoed in a whole series of conceptual pairs that have been applied to an interpretation of architecture—Isaiah Berlin’s Hedgehog and Fox, Claude Levi-Straus’s Bricoleur and Engineer, Terunobu Fujimori’s Red and White. In a debate at Harvard in 1982 between Alexander and Peter Eisenmann,13 it was Eisenmann who pointed out their extreme differences might have been a result of this opposite imbalance, pointing out that, ‘In the Jungian cosmology, you may be a feeling type and I may be a thinking type. And I will never be able to have the kind of feeling that you have, and vice versa.”

In this way of seeing, all form is structure and all structure is ornament—a rhythmic physical presence and expression. No artificial distinction based on whether an element performs structurally or could be justified as serving a function.

Alexander’s project, at its deepest, is an attempt to recover this understanding for the making of the built environment—to see the world not as a collection of objects to be designed but as a living field. He sought to provide an aid for this through language, as a kind of making explicit and shareable the things that were once tacit and embedded in people. The word for this, in the architectural tradition Alexander never quite entered into because of his geographic exile, is Baukultur: not building as an act of individual will, but as a culture of building, shared ways of making and maintaining things, from which quality emerges over time.14

Beyond inspiration from the patterns, it is Alexander’s uncompromising position which makes his work so hard for architects, especially good ones, to digest—but also the very thing that makes his viewpoint so valuable as a challenge to our prevailing way of doing things, and our habit of abstraction. Alexander had the persistence and courage to put into words things that are usually left unsaid by architects. He also said his own theories were a gate to be passed through. This echoes Ludwig Wittgenstein, another Viennese exile, when he wrote:

“My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical. When he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world alright.”