But Alexander was best known, and perhaps best loved, by architects. Robert Campbell, a Boston-based architecture critic and longtime RECORD contributing editor, recalled discovering “A City is Not a Tree”—an essay in which Alexander described modern buildings as proof that “the world is going to the dogs”—in the library of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, soon after it was published in 1965. “That was a landmark moment in my development as a thinker and as an architect,” Campbell said in a speech at the National Building Museum in Washington during a celebration of the essay’s 50th anniversary. “It really blew away what were the foundational principles of the education at Harvard in those days.” 

In later years, Campbell became friends with Alexander. “We think of him as such an intellectual,” Campbell said by phone this week, “but by the time I got to know him he was just going out into the world and experiencing. Experiencing! There was no room for experience in the modern movement. He said let’s go out and see what works.” 

Alexander designed scores of buildings, many of them quaint, almost Victorian. They ranged from a small house in Berkeley to a high school and college near Tokyo. The last book Alexander published, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems (2012), describes the Japan project in Manichean terms. He was a hero among New Urbanists, who treated his pronouncements about livable neighborhoods as gospel. But others saw him as reactionary. During his Berkeley years, he said, he and his students were harassed. And according to The New York Times, he even sued the university for infringing on his academic freedom. 

Wolfgang Christopher Alexander was born in Austria in 1936 to a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, both archaeologists. Fleeing the Nazis, the family moved to England when Christopher was two. He spent his childhood in Arundel, a small town in West Sussex with a large number of historic buildings, then won a scholarship to Cambridge. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1958 to attend Harvard and MIT, and in 1963 he joined the U.C. Berkeley architecture faculty. 

After retiring from Berkeley, he returned to Arundel but continued working. In 2002 to 2004 he self-published The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, a four-volume treatise that had been in the works for decades. Reviewing a galley of the first volume, The Phenomenon of Life, for RECORD in 2002, William S. Saunders, the editor of the Harvard Design Magazine and a one-time admirer of Alexander, called the book ''full of contradictions, foggy generalities and extreme and unsupported assertions.'' (Alexander responded to the review here.) And in 2003, Peter Eisenman, whom Alexander famously debated—and insulted—in 1982, told Emily Eakin of the Times that Alexander “fell off the radar screen some time ago. He got off into being cranky.”

Saunders and Eisenman may not have been entirely wrong. But to thousands of architects put off by antiseptic, ahistorical, and inhumane approaches to design, Alexander was and is a hero.