- Grabow, Stephen: Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and Boston, 1983. ISBN 0853621993
- The Nature of Order Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life (2002)
- The Nature of Order Book 2: The Process of Creating Life (2002)
- The Nature of Order Book 3: A Vision of a Living World (2005)
- 1985 Best building in Japan Award, by the Japan Institute of Architects
- The Nature of Order Book 4: The Luminous Ground (2004)
Published works[edit]
Alexander's published works include:
- Community and Privacy, with Serge Chermayeff (1963)
- Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964)
- A City is Not a Tree (1965)[47]
- The Atoms of Environmental Structure (1967)
- A Pattern Language which Generates Multi-service Centers, with Ishikawa and Silverstein (1968)
- Houses Generated by Patterns (1969)
- The Grass Roots Housing Process (1973)[48]
- The Center for Environmental Structure Series, made up of:
- The Oregon Experiment (1975)
- A Pattern Language, with Ishikawa and Silverstein (1977)
- The Timeless Way of Building (1979)
- The Linz Cafe (1981)
- The Production of Houses, with Davis, Martinez, and Corner (1985)
- A New Theory of Urban Design, with Neis, Anninou, and King (1987)
- Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets (1993)
- The Mary Rose Museum, with Black and Tsutsui (1995)
- The Nature of Order Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life (2002)
- The Nature of Order Book 2: The Process of Creating Life (2002)
- The Nature of Order Book 3: A Vision of a Living World (2005)
- The Nature of Order Book 4: The Luminous Ground (2004)
- The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle between Two World-Systems, with Hans Joachim Neis and Maggie More Alexander (2012)
Alexander is known for many books on the design and construction process, including Notes on the Synthesis of Form, The City is Not a Tree (first published in paper form and republished in book form in 2015), Timeless Ways of Building, A A New Theory for Urban Design and the Oregon Experiment. He has recently published four volumes, The Essence of Order: Essays on the Art of Architecture and the Nature of the Universe, on his recent theory of the process of “morphogenesis”, and the fight for life and beauty on Earth, such as his theories in Japan implementation in a large construction project. All of his writings have developed or accumulated from his earlier writings, so his writings should be read as a whole, not as fragments. His lifetime work, or his best work, is The Essence of Order, on which he worked for about 30 years, and the first edition of The Essence of Order was made in 1981, There was a famous debate with Peter Eisenman a year ago. Harvard.
Alexander is probably best known for his 1977 book The Language of Patterns, which has remained well-loved about 4 years after its publication. Inferring that users are more sensitive to their needs than any architect, he produced and validated (with his students Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid King and Shlomo Angel) a “pattern language” , to empower anyone to design and build at any scale.
Rebel's Quest Is to Make Every Client An Architect
Young people are drawn to Mr. Alexander's principled attack on the architecture establishment, expressed in language that inspires comparisons to Martin Heidegger and Kahlil Gibran.
But Mr. Alexander's philosophy of ''every man an architect'' has hardly endeared him to those in the mainstream of his profession in this country. Neither have his rare excursions into building, most of which have taken place abroad. His experiments in Tokyo; Linz, Austria; Mexicali, Mexico, and Lima, Peru, are major stops on the architecture student's grand tour, but they have done little to alter Mr. Alexander's image as a a counterculture figure.
Bay Area. Since 1984 he has completed three houses in the suburbs east of San Francisco, and a shelter that he designed for the homeless is under construction in San Jose. At his studio in Martinez, he is working on plans for a high-density housing complex for downtown Oakland and a line of office furniture.
****
Mr. Alexander is famous for a 1976 experiment in Mexicali, where owners helped design and build their own houses for $3,500 each.
In 1983, Mr. Alexander applied his belief in collaboration to a Bay Area house, a three-story concrete tower built for $103,000 in the hills north of Berkeley. Mr. Alexander asked his clients, Andre and Anna Sala, to think of the most pleasant room they had ever seen. Mr. Sala thought of the kitchen of a French farmhouse. A trestle table faced a stone fireplace on one side. On the other side, tall windows opened out onto a garden.
''The client's sense of well-being'' is the standard by which Mr. Alexander measures the success of his designs. ''People talk about the peace they feel in my houses,''
''People are afraid of color,'' he said. ''They are afraid of its emotional power. So they cling to monochromatic good taste.''
家具設計
After 30 years as a theorist, Mr. Alexander is descending from the ivory tower. He is pleased with what he calls a ''warming trend'' in the factionalized world of academic architecture. ''I was always sorry that people thought I was such an oddball,'' he said. ''In my first books, I thought I was just saying what everybody felt.''
****
Architecture's Irascible Reformer
Over all, the effect is quaint. The center, which houses a gift shop and a cafeteria for the 35-acre gardens next door, could have been plucked from the pages of a fairy tale -- a primmer English version of ''Hansel and Gretel.''
But to Christopher Alexander, the architect who designed it, the center represents something much less whimsical: a small social revolution.
For nearly four decades, Mr. Alexander, 66, an emeritus professor of architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, has been waging a quixotic campaign of messianic ambition: to heal the world by reforming the way it builds.
Humanity, he says, is ailing. And the built world is both source and symptom of its disease. Where there should be beautiful buildings in harmony with nature, he says, there is mostly ''architecture which is against life'' instead, ''insane, image-ridden, hollow.''
Asked as part of one assignment to design a house, he instead submitted a spoof of the formalist theory he had been taught: a glass box slashed by giant brick walls. ''A completely abstract, pointless notion,'' he said. To his amazement, the head of the department called him into his office to congratulate him. ''He said, 'Christopher, my boy, this is exactly what we want,' '' Mr. Alexander recalled. ''I thought, Oh my God, I've walked into the nut house.''
In 1958, he left England for
'And I didn't know how to harness the energy and thought of the people to create their village. I thought: I've got to figure out how that is done.''
His solution was ''A Pattern Language,'
but by the people who live in them, the authors presented the book as an all-purpose how-to guide for creating a global utopia: the built world boiled down to 253 patterns. From ''country towns'' (pattern 6) and ''green streets'' (pattern 51) to ''six-foot balcony'' (pattern 167), no design feature was too big or too small to merit detailed consideration.
He says he and and his students were victims of intellectual harassment. In 1985 he filed a formal complaint against the university, charging it with violating his academic freedom. Seven years later, the matter was quietly settled, and in 1998, he retired.But the embattled life seems to agree with Mr. Alexander, who has been getting up at 2 a.m. to work on a new book, ''Deep Adaptation.''
