Christopher Alexander, a British-American architect, educator, and theorist whose writings on human-centered design have had a profound impact not only on architecture, but also on urban planning, computer science, and other fields, died March 17 in West Sussex, England, after a long illness. He was 85 years old.
Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996, Alexander had received a considerable number of prestigious awards and honors, including the American Institute of Architects’ inaugural Medal for Research in 1972, the Vincent Scully Award in 2009, and a World Award for Sustainable Architecture in 2014. In a dispatch written by Robert Steuteville on the occasion of Alexander’s death announcement for the Congress for the New Urbanism’s (CNU) online journal Public Square, Alexander is featured as a “seminal figure in architecture and urbanism” and “one of the greatest influences on the New Urbanism movement.” In 2006, CNU awarded Alexander one of its first two Athena Medals, along with Leon Krier. Other Athena Medal winners include Denise Scott Brown, Robert A.M. Stern, Sinclair Black and the late Jaquelin T. Robertson.
Born in Vienna in 1936 to a Jewish mother and Catholic father, young Alexander and his parents emigrated from Austria to England at the outbreak of World War II. After studying at Cambridge University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master’s degree in mathematics, Alexander moved to the United States in 1958, where he earned a doctorate in architecture from Harvard University – the very first such doctorate awarded by that institution. Alexander’s stay on the East Coast was short-lived, however, and he spent most of his adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he practiced architecture, wrote extensively on design theory, and taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Professor Emeritus of Architecture.
In 1967, Alexander founded the Center for Environmental Structure (CES), a Berkeley-based nonprofit organization, and established PatternLanguage.com in 2020.
Although he has designed hundreds of buildings, including the West Dean Visitors Centre in West Sussex, the Eishin Gakuen High School campus outside Tokyo, and the experimental Sala House in Albany, California, he is perhaps best known for his widely read (and rarely controversial) writings on design, including the 1965 essay a City is Not a Tree (republished and expanded in book form in 2015), The Timeless Way of Building (1979), and the seminal 1977 book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, which not only established his reputation as a guru among single-family builders and New Urbanists, but also as the father of the pattern language movement in computer science.
The considerable and lasting influence of A Pattern Language (co-authored by Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein with Ingrid King, Shlomo Angel, and Max Jacobsen) cannot be underestimated. Among the first books written in a hypertext format, this best-selling tome inspired computer programmer Ward Cunningham to develop the first wiki in 1994. Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, has also said that Alexander’s work served as direct inspiration for the development of the city-building video game.
Alexander’s last published work in his lifetime was 2012’s The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems.
“There is a timeless way to build. It is thousands of years old and is the same today as it has always been,” Alexander writes in The Timeless Way of Building. “The great traditional buildings of the past, the towns, tents, and temples in which man feels at home, were always erected by people who lived near the core of that way of life”. And as you will see, this path will lead anyone who seeks it to buildings that are themselves as ancient in form as the trees and hills are, and as our faces are.”
This article is a brief announcement of Alexander’s death – a fuller tribute will follow in the coming days.
Read the article in French
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