Christopher Alexander, Architect Who Humanized Urban Design, Dies at 85 / Christopher Alexander obituary

 

Christopher Alexander, Architect Who Humanized Urban Design, Dies at 85

 

A fierce anti-modernist, he championed vernacular structures, becoming a counterculture hero to many, from New Urbanists to software designers to Prince Charles.

 

Penelope Green

By Penelope Green

March 29, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/29/arts/christopher-alexander-dead.html

 

Christopher Alexander, the Viennese-born professor, architect and theorist who believed that ordinary people, not just trained architects, should have a hand in designing their houses, neighborhoods and cities, and proposed a method for doing so in writing that could be poetically erudite, frustratingly abstract and breathtakingly simple, died on March 17 at his home in Sussex, England. He was 85.

 

The cause was pneumonia, his wife, Margaret Moore, said.

 

Mr. Alexander was a fierce anti-modernist who found traditional and indigenous structures — the beehive-shaped huts of North Africa, for example, or medieval Italian villages — more aesthetically pleasing than highly designed contemporary ones, which he saw as ugly and soulless.

 

He was a math prodigy turned counterculture guru who influenced other counterculture gurus, like Stewart Brand, the futurist and founder of the magazine Whole Earth Catalog, and whose 1994 book, “How Buildings Learn,” was directly inspired by Mr. Alexander’s writing.

 

Like the urbanists Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, Mr. Alexander encouraged city planners to think in human — and humane — terms, giving rise to the New Urbanists, who designed communities based on his principles: walkable neighborhoods, houses with front porches to encourage socializing, and lots of green space.

 

 

His ideas found a broad audience. Software designers applied them to computer programming. Brian Eno, the cerebral British rock star, thought the architect’s works were essential reading for anyone hoping to cure societal ills. And when Prince Charles began his sustained, and much ridiculed, attack on modern architecture in the early 1990s, he turned to Mr. Alexander for guidance on opening a school devoted to traditional classical styles.

 

“I am trying to make a building which is like a smile on a person’s face,” Mr. Alexander told Stephen Grabow, author of “Christopher Alexander: The Search for a New Paradigm in Architecture” (1983), “and which has that kind of rightness about it, and which is really like that and not just saying it is like that.”

 

Mr. Alexander spent his lifetime cataloging and analyzing the built and the natural environment. He studied mathematics, philosophy, cognitive psychology and architecture, and he used all of these disciplines to argue in favor of the handmade and the homespun.

 

At the University of Cambridge, though he was a scholarship student, he hired his own aesthetics tutor because he wanted to understand, and quantify, beauty. He helped build a school in an Indian village and low-income housing in Peru. He spent a year in Mexicali, Mexico, creating housing for government workers and their families with their participation, for a cost of about $3,500 a house. He developed a building system that included concrete blocks that could be stacked together like Legos without mortar, enabling families not only to design their houses but also to build them.

 

But it was his writing that became a touchstone for many, particularly his signature work, “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction” (1977). Devotees found it radical; critics dismissed it as nostalgic and regressive. It is still in print and, unusually for an architecture book, continues to sell extraordinarily well, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of copies in English and nearly a dozen other languages.

 

“A Pattern Language” has been compared to “Joy of Cooking” for its homey insights and encyclopedic range, and to the  I-Ching for its sagacity. Patricia Leigh Brown of The New York Times called it “a wise old owl of a book, one to curl up with in an inglenook on a rainy day.” (Mr. Alexander was pro-nook.)

 

Written with Mr. Alexander’s colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure, the design laboratory he founded in the late 1960s in Berkeley, Calif., the book clocks in at more than 1,100 pages and describes 253 patterns — think of them as qualities — that might be considered in designing a home, neighborhood or city. They are laid out it in 253 short, evocative chapters illustrated with Mr. Alexander’s idiosyncratic drawings and diagrams, which recall Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s sketch of a hat that wasn’t a hat in “The Little Prince.”

 

Mr. Brand, speaking by phone, called “A Pattern Language” “perfect, and highly original, in content and in form.”

 

“It was clear when it came out that it was a shortcut to designing and making a place you would like to be in,” he said.

 

Consider Pattern 187, the Marriage Bed. “It is crucial that the couple choose the right time to build the bed, and not buy one at the drop of a hat,” Mr. Alexander wrote. “It is unlikely the bed can have the right feeling until the couple has weathered some hard times together and there is some depth to their experience.” He suggested tucking the bed into an alcove, rather than letting it float, unmoored and unprotected, in the bedroom.

 

Or Pattern 190, Ceiling Height Variety: “A building in which all ceiling heights are the same is virtually incapable of making people comfortable.”

 

The book is a delightful, if exhausting, grammar of architecture that has nothing to do with style or historicism and everything to do with what makes people feel good — warm colors, pools of light, low ceilings, overhanging roofs — a guide to coziness, in essence, that Mr. Alexander and his colleagues tried to wrestle into a kind of formula using all manner of sources, from empathy studies to the ideal proportions found in a Japanese house.

 

“He was one of the few people who thought systematically about architecture,” Witold Rybczynski, the author, architect and professor emeritus of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, said in a phone interview. “And he tried, in a sometimes laborious way, to understand why we like what we like. I never tried to design anything using ‘A Pattern Language’; I think it would be impossible. But when my wife and I built our own house, I realized how many of Alexander’s patterns were present.”

 

Mr. Rybczynski recalled being struck by Mr. Alexander during their first encounter: “I finally met him in 1994, when he won the Seaside Prize” — an award given by the New Urbanist community in Florida — “and he said something I’ve never forgotten: ‘Everything we see in our surroundings raises our spirits a bit or lowers them a bit.’”

 

“His work is full of these kind of insights,” Mr. Rybczynski added.

 

Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander was born Oct. 4, 1936, in Vienna, the only child of Ferdinand Johann Alfred Alexander and Lilly Edith Elizabeth (Deutsch) Alexander, who were archaeologists. The family left Austria in 1938, when Nazi Germany began its occupation, and settled in Oxford, England, where Chris’s parents found work as German-language teachers. Chris, gifted in math and chemistry, won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and architecture and, on the side, beauty.

 

Modern architecture, the coin of the realm at the time, horrified him; he thought it grim-looking and uncomfortable to be in and was convinced that most other people did, too. He often said he felt like the little boy in the folk tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” pointing out what was only obvious. Nonetheless, after Cambridge he went on to architecture school at Harvard, where he earned a Ph.D. in the subject in 1963. His dissertation, “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” — a prequel of sorts to “A Pattern Language” — promptly earned the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal; it was his first book, and Mr. Alexander was barely 30.

 

That same year, he was appointed a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, a position he held until 1998.

 

Although Mr. Alexander is better known for his written work, he did design some 200 structures on five continents, including a community health center in Modesto, Calif.; a homeless shelter in San Jose, Calif.; a cafe in Austria; and, most notably, a portion of a private university in Tokyo called the Eishin Campus with a stunning great hall.

 

The Alexander method, boiled down, was participatory, emotional and adaptive — he didn’t like to design on paper, preferring to create in three dimensions, on site — and not all clients had the patience for such things. Mr. Alexander liked to say that a measure of a house’s success was the client’s well-being.

 

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters, Lily and Sophie. An earlier marriage, to Pamela Patrick, a classical singer, ended in divorce.

 

Mr. Alexander was the author of nearly 20 books, including what he considered his magnum opus, “The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe,” a four-volume door stop published between 2003 and 2005.

 

That book scoops up, in photos and illustrations and inscrutable but tantalizing text involving a lot of math and physics, the entirety of the natural and built world, to make the argument that beauty is a quantifiable quality that most people can agree upon, and is not, in fact, in the eye of the beholder. To do so, Mr. Alexander used a universe’s worth of examples, among them Moroccan tiles, soap bubbles, snowflakes, meandering rivers and dewdrops on a spider’s web.

 

When the first volume was published in 2003, the cultural critic Laura Miller, writing in The New York Times, described Mr. Alexander as a prophet without honor in his own profession whose books should be required reading.

 

After gamely making her way through the volume, Ms. Miller wrote, she found herself looking at familiar objects with new eyes: “Not as momentous as a new science, I’ll grant you, but a revelation all the same.”

 

Penelope Green is an obituaries reporter for The New York Times. She has been a reporter for the Style and Home sections, editor of Styles of The Times, an early iteration of Style, and a story editor at The New York Times Magazine. She lives in Manhattan. @greenpnyt • Facebook

 

 

Christopher Alexander obituary

 

Architect and theorist who believed in creating human-centred buildings, drawing on new technology and ancient traditions

 

Howard Davis

Tue 29 Mar 2022 19.48 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/mar/29/christopher-alexander-obituary

 

The architect Christopher Alexander, who has died aged 85, saw buildings and cities as living frameworks for human beings. Through designing, building, teaching and writing, he sought “to provide a complete working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building and planning”.

 

Like many critics of postwar reconstruction, he saw much that was destructive of community and incapable of elevating the human spirit, and set about a systematic approach to making buildings in which people could feel at home. He wanted to identify the order that lies behind beauty and meaning in the built world, and then learn, as an architect and builder, how to make it. I knew him as a teacher, colleague and mentor.

 

A housing project in the barrios of Lima, the capital of Peru, in 1969 began with his team living for five weeks with different families on site, observing the details of daily life, to develop what he called a “pattern language” of 67 principles that formed the basis for the design.

 

In a housing project in Mexico in 1975-76 built with steel-reinforced soil-cement blocks and roof vaults of lightweight concrete, families laid out their own houses on the site, and participated in their construction, developing details as the work proceeded. This direct and detailed involvement of both architect and client served to promote a more accurate outcome.

 

His approach provided the basis of an architecture bestseller, A Pattern Language (1977). Each of 253 “patterns”, with its own number, describes a helpful relationship between parts of the environment, and consists of a title – such as Public Outdoor Room, South Facing Outdoors or Windows Overlooking Life – explanatory text, diagrams and photographs. The patterns are linked to each other in a network structure, which gave the book an appeal to the software developers among its general readership.

 

More and larger projects followed – a marketplace and a shelter for homeless people in San Jose, California (1990), the West Dean visitors’ centre in West Sussex (1994-96), an apartment building in Tokyo (1988), a series of houses in California and Washington state, and many others.

 

In them, Chris tried to achieve buildings that are alive and at peace with themselves, what he called “the quality without a name”, as described in his book The Timeless Way of Building (1979).

 

He developed detailed understandings of places, activities and forms at a range of scales and in relationship to each other, and his projects always incorporated construction innovations, ranging from walls made with interlocking soil-cement blocks laid without mortar, to walls made with local flint along with concrete and brick, to digital techniques that aided the design of large timber-framed buildings in Japan.

 

Many of Chris’s sources came from traditional and vernacular buildings, leading some people to see him as old-fashioned or nostalgic. But to him, those buildings were not to be copied, but used to bring to light principles of order that he saw as lacking in contemporary architecture. His was not a reaction against style, but a recognition of the recurrent structure of beautiful buildings and places. His collection of old Turkish carpets contributed to his last major set of books, The Nature of Order (four volumes, 2002-04).

 

Perhaps his most significant project was the Eishin high school, outside Tokyo, designed and built in the early 1980s. A months-long process of involvement with the school’s teachers, staff and students resulted in a project-specific pattern language addressing the several dozen features of the school that the clients saw as most important.

 

Working on the site itself transformed that idealised picture into something that took advantage of the site’s hills and water, while maintaining the essence of the core ideas. And the process of making it brought together Chris’s team with that of a large construction company, working with local craftsmen who did much of the carpentry and the shikkui plaster on the walls of the buildings.

 

The project won awards and was enjoyed by the teachers and students. The buildings and gardens have a strong sense of place, and much of the quality of traditional Japanese building. But it was also large and complex enough to reveal incompletely answered questions: how to reconcile a highly interactive process of design and building, attentive to the emerging feeling of the place, with the practicalities of budget, timeline and the norms of construction. Nonetheless it represents a major achievement.

 

It incorporated the earlier idea of pattern languages as a way of being explicit about human needs in the environment with a later, more inclusive set of ideas about beauty and wholeness – ideas that indeed stretched beyond architecture to the sciences, particularly biology and cosmology.

 

Born Wolfgang Christian Johann Alexander in Vienna, Austria, Chris was the son of Lilly (nee Deutsch) and Ferdinand Alexander, both classical archaeologists. In 1938 Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and the family moved to Britain.

 

Chris’s father told him that if he wanted to study architecture, he first needed to study something more intellectually rigorous. So he took degrees in mathematics and architecture at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1958 went to Harvard University, where he took the first PhD in architecture awarded there. In 1963 he was appointed to the architecture faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and remained there until returning to Britain early in the new century.

 

To many architects and faculty colleagues at Berkeley, Chris violated the conventional wisdom that beauty is subjective and to talk about it is overly sentimental. Working with him was not always easy, but the fact that everyone’s comments were always taken seriously helped make the effort worthwhile. Chris realised that the smallest hint of unease about an idea might be the sign of something important.

 

The office that he founded in 1967, the Center for Environmental Structure, was always small, with a half dozen or so people. Projects were taken up for the opportunity to experiment and advance the theoretical work rather than to maintain cashflow. Chris saw his most important role as that of a writer, and in an age of upheaval his ideas of simple beauty and the need to support the basic humanity of people may become even more influential.

 

In 1980 he married Pamela Patrick, and they had two daughters, Lily and Sophie. The marriage ended in divorce in 2007, and the following year he married Maggie Moore. She and his daughters survive him.

 

 Christopher Alexander, architect, academic and writer, born 4 October 1936; died 17 March 2022