Although Christopher Alexander, who died this year on March 17, was officially an architect, the significance of his life lay in the challenge he posed to architecture. In a sense, he did not believe that -architects were necessary. Put a small group of people on a building site, give them materials and colors, and let them work through the endless factors—spatial, visual, tactile, olfactory—that go into the design of a house, and they will invariably produce something more attuned to their human needs than any architect sitting at his drafting table ever could.
These ideas were codified in a series of books, of which A Pattern Language (1977) was the most influential and the most extraordinary. Although compiled by a team of authors, A Pattern Language is essentially Alexander’s book, and yet in a sense it is scarcely a book at all. It comprises some 253 “patterns,” each forming a case study of “a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment,” although they are almost never recognized as the same generic problem.
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