Christopher Alexander is an influential architect and design theorist known for developing the concept of pattern language. He authored A Pattern Language, which describes patterns that address problems in architecture, urban design and community livability. Alexander has designed over 100 buildings and his theories have impacted fields beyond architecture. He sees human-centered design as key and advocates an approach that creates living structures attuned to people's needs.

1. The Father Of Pattern Language

2.  Born 4 October 1936 in Vienna, Austria
 Widely influential architect and design theorist, and
currently emeritus professor at the University of California,
Berkeley.
 His theories about the nature of human-
centered design have had notable impacts across many
fields beyond architecture, including urban
design, software, sociology and other fields.
 Alexander has also designed and personally built over 100
buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor.

3. Alexander is known for his
many books on the design
and building process,
including
 A Pattern Language, with Ishikawa
and Silverstein (1977)
 The Timeless Way of Building (1979)
 The Linz Cafe (1981)
 The Production of Houses
 A City is Not a Tree (first published as
a paper and recently re-published in
book form)
 Community and Privacy, with Serge
Chermayeff (1963)
 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 Grass Roots Housing
Process (1973)
 The Oregon Experiment (1975)
 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)
 A Pattern Language which
Generates Multi-service Centers,
with Ishikawa and Silverstein
(1968)
 Houses Generated by
Patterns (1969
 Notes on the Synthesis of
Form (1964) A city is not a
tree (1965)
 The Atoms of Environmental

4.  Alexander attended Oundle school, England. In 1954,
he was awarded the top open scholarship to Trinity
College, Cambridge University in chemistry and physics,
and went on to read mathematics. He earned
a Bachelor's degree in Architecture and a Master's
degree in Mathematics. He took his doctorate at
Harvard (the first Ph.D. in Architecture ever awarded
at Harvard University), and was elected fellow at
Harvard. During the same period he worked at MIT in
transportation theory and computer science, and worked
at Harvard in cognition and cognitive studies.

5. Phenomenon of Life
(Nature of Order Book One).
 Alexander proposes a scientific view of the world in
which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of
life and sets this understanding of order as an
intellectual basis for a new architecture.
 He introduces the concept of living structure, basing
it upon his theories of centers and of wholeness.
 He defines the fifteen properties according to his
observations, all wholeness is built.
 Alexander argues that living structure is at once
both personal and structural.

6. The Process of Creating Life
(Nature of Order Book Two).
• In the 20th century our societie’s best
efforts and intentions, architects and
planners working within these processes,
could not achieve a living built environment.
• In this book, Alexander puts forward a fully
developed theory of living process.
•He defines conditions for a process to be
living
• This concept defined in Book 1: A
structure-preserving transformation is one
which preserves, extends, and enhances
the wholeness of a system. Making changes
in society, so that streets, buildings, rooms,
gardens, towns may be generated by
hundreds of such sequences, requires
massive transformations. This book is the
first blueprint of those transformations.

7. A Vision of a Living World
(Nature of Order Book Three)
 Providing hundreds of examples of buildings and places,
this volume demonstrates proposes forms for large buildings,
public spaces, communities, neighborhoods, which then lead
to discussions about the equally importantance
 With these examples, laypeople, architects, builders, artists,
and students are able to make this new framework real for
themselves, for their own lives, and understand how it works
and its significance

8. The Luminous Ground
(Nature of Order Book Four).
 The mechanistic thinking and the consequent investment-
oriented tracts of houses, condominiums and offices in the 20th
century have dehumanized our cities and our lives.
 Are spirit, soul, emotion, feeling to be introduced into a building, or
a street, or a development project, in modern times
 . He shows us conclusively that a spiritual, emotional, and
personal basis must underlie every act of building.
 This radical view can conform to our most ordinary, daily
intuitions. It may provide a path for those contemporary
scientists who are beginning to see consciousness as the
underpinning of all matter, and thus as a proper object of
scientific study.
 It will change, forever, our conception of what buildings are.

9. Timeless way of building.
 There is one timeless way of building. It is a
thousand years old.
 The same today as it has ever been. The
great traditional buildings of the past.
 The villages and tents and temples in which
man feels at home, have always been made
by people who were very close to the center
of this way. It is not possible to make great
buildings, or great towns, beautiful places,
places where you feel yourself, places where
you feel alive, except by following this way.
 As you will see, this way will lead anyone who
looks for it to buildings which are themselves
as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills,
and as our faces are.

10. • The West Dean
Visitors Centre, is part
of the West Dean
College estate and
grounds, including the
Arts and Crafts college,
and the refurbished
Victorian garden.

11. The north face of the main building, the
first sight when one enters the grounds.

14. Low-Cost Houses in
Mexicali

16. Alexander's work has widely
influenced architects
 Sarah Susanka, Andres
Duany, and Witold Rybczynski , Robert
Campbell
 Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic
for the Boston Globe
stated that Alexander "has had
an enormous critical influence on my life
and work, and I think that's true of a whole
generation of people."

17. The Timeless Way of
Building(1979)
 A Pattern Language
 The Oregon Experiment
 It has had a huge influence on creative
thinking, especially in the areas of
architecture and software design.
 the concept of the "quality without a name“
 The style used in The Timeless Way of
Building is also unusual for an architectural
text.

18. A CITY IS NOT A TREE
• The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves.
• It is the name of an abstract structure.
• Collected in groups and units .
• I shall contrast it with another, more complex
abstract structure called a semilattice.
• In order to relate these abstract structures to the
nature of the city, I must first make a simple
distinction.
• A set is a collection of elements which for some
reason we think of as belonging together.
• means that you cannot consider the environment by
breaking it down into small parts, but you need to see
it as a set of units, which support and enhance each
other in a complex and interdependent whole.

19. Eishin Academy,
“Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth”
EISHIN SCHOOL, TOKYO COVER OF BOOK

20.  Christopher Alexander’s latest book is subtitled “A
struggle between two world-systems,” and it is largely
the theme of conflict, both conceptual and real-world,
that this architect and architectural theorist uses to
organize the story of his designing and fabricating the
36-building, 10-million-dollar Eishin School, a 2000-
student combination high school and college in suburban
Tokyo, Japan, begun in 1981 and largely completed by
1990 (seven buildings remain to be constructed).

21. The book is classified into 4 parts as follows:
 Part One, “Solving the Problem of Architecture in Our Time” (chaps. 1–6), uses
architectural examples from the completed Eishin campus as a means to illustrate
practical, conceptual, and ethical concerns
 Part Two, “Rumblings of a Coming Battle” (chaps. 7–12), describes the
programming for the campus, beginning with the dream of the school’s
progressive principal Hisae Hosoi
 The most prominent chapter in Part Two is the complete Eishin pattern language :
 Even before we have any idea about the physical configuration of the buildings,
their shape, or design, or the way these [elements] are made real in space, it is
already obvious that the school is given its life to an enormous degree merely by
this list of patterns

22.  Part Three, “Pitched Battle” (chaps. 13–19), depicts the “battle” between Systems
A and B, once Alexander’s California firm, in cooperation with the Eishin
administration, actually begins campus construction.
 To conceptualize the Eishin story, Alexander identifies two contrasting approaches
to design and construction—what he labels “System A” and “System B.”
 System A is “concerned with the well being of the world—its land, ecosystems,
and people”
 “System B,” the villain of the Eishin story and only concerned with money, power,
control, and rapidity of production.
 Part Four, Alexander moves discussion to the broader theoretical themes more
thoroughly discussed in his four-volume master work, The Nature of Order (2002–
2005)

23. Summary
 Christoper Alexander's always controversial work raises
issues critical to regenerating the environment and
creating a new culture for building—and rebuilding—
our cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and gardens.
 Demonstrates the application of Alexander's theories
and methods to a large-scale project and shows how
architecture can bring life to a community.
 The creative processes described in the book are for
anyone who designs, builds, shapes, repairs, or
otherwise modifies the built environment.

24. PATTERN LANGUAGE
• A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,
Construction,1977 is a book on architecture, urban
design, And community livability.
• It was authored by Christopher Alexander, Sara
Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for
Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, with
writing credits also to Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-
King and Shlomo Angel. Decades after its
publication, it is still one of the best-selling books on
architecture.

25.  The book creates a new language, what the authors call a pattern
language derived from timeless entities called patterns.
 Patterns describe a problem and then offer a solution. In doing so the authors
intend to give ordinary people, not only professionals, a way to work with
their neighbors to improve a town or neighborhood, design a house for
themselves or work with colleagues to design an office, workshop or public
building such as a school.
 The book uses words to describe patterns, supported by drawings,
photographs and charts.
 It describes exact methods for constructing practical, safe, and attractive
designs at every scale, from entire regions, through cities, neighborhoods,
gardens, buildings, rooms, built-in furniture, and fixtures down to the level of
doorknobs. The patterns are regarded by the authors not as infallible, but as
hypotheses
 Pattern Language - Official web site of Christopher Alexander.

26.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language
 https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-battle-for-the-life-and-
beauty-of-the-earth-9780199898077?cc=in&lang=en&
 http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/Seamon_Alexander_Battle.htm
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander]
 http://www.patternlanguage.com/
BIBLIOGRAPHY