Christopher Alexander

Books

• A pattern language : towns, buildings, construction

• The timeless way of building, ISBN 0195024028
  From the cover:
  There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always 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. And 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.

• Notes on the synthesis of form, ISBN 0674627512

• The Oregon experiment, ISBN 0-19-501824-9
  Describes an alternative for master plans, in this case for the University of Oregon.

• A foreshadowing of 21st century art, ISBN 0-19-520866-8
  From the cover:
  This book makes an important contribution to the world of carpet scholarship. It contains the first coherent theory of structure of carpet designs, and contains much material that anticipates Alexander's general theory of order which will appear in the forthcoming volume of that name.

• Nature of order
  From a preview by Nikos Salingaros (one of the editors of the book):
  The Nature of Order has been in preparation for over thirty years, and encapsulates all of Christopher Alexander's theories. My own modest contribution has been to help Professor Alexander edit the manuscript during the past fifteen years. In this monumental book, Alexander develops a comprehensive theory of how matter comes together to form coherent structures. Parallelling, but not copying, recent results from complexity theory, he argues that the same laws apply to all structures in the universe; from atoms, to crystals, to living forms, to galaxies. Human beings apparently have a built-in (though subconscious) understanding of these laws. Man's creations have the option of following the same laws, or violating them. Those that follow them result in our greatest achievements, either as artifacts, as buildings, or as cities.

Website

www.patternlanguage.com

Related concepts

• Pattern language
• Vernacular architecture