Christopher Alexander, who died last week at 85, was brainy. Besides obtaining two architecture degrees, he “read” mathematics at Cambridge, then studied cognition at Harvard and transportation theory and computer science at MIT; he taught at Berkeley for nearly 40 years; and he wrote a couple dozen books of extraordinary erudition. He was also bossy. His most famous book, A Pattern Language (1977), contains 253 prescriptions, ranging from how to organize the planet (“Wherever possible, work toward the evolution of independent regions in the world, each with a population between 2 and 10 million”), to how to organize a bathroom (“put in two or three racks for huge towels, one by the door, one by the shower, one by the sink”). He made provision for other people’s ideas, sort of. Among the 253 entries in A Pattern Language, several are marked with double asterisks—meaning, according to Alexander’s introduction, that they identify “a property common to all possible ways of solving the stated problem.”
Not long ago, the New York Times Magazine named A Pattern Language, written by Alexander with several Berkeley colleagues, one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books, ever. It is also a perennial best-seller, drawing legions of fans to Alexander’s eloquent appeals for rooms, buildings, parks, communities, and cities made of parts that users will relate to and find beautiful. His influence extended into other fields, including systems architecture. The first wiki—the collaborative structure that gave rise to Wikipedia—grew directly out of Alexander’s work. So did the original SimCity games. And his method of dividing large structures into manageable parts has influenced generations of coders. Richard Gabriel, a computer scientist at Sun Microsystems, told The New York Times in 2003 that, in his world, “Chris is a revered cult figure.”
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