Christopher Alexander

A professor at the University of California, Berkeley and licensed contractor as well as architect, Christopher Alexander is famous mostly for his populism, and his theoretical contributions. With Sarah Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, he produced and validated an archtectural system, a pattern language designed to empower any human being to design and build quite well at any scale. He began the project because he believes that users know more about the buildings they need than any architect could.

The Timeless Way of Building Described the perfection of use to which buildings could aspire.

A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction described the architectural system in a form that theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar[?]. It provides rules and forms, and leaves decisions to be taken from the precise environment of the project. This book's method was adopted by the University of Oregon, as described in The Oregon Experiment, with only indifferent success, although it remains the official building method.

The idea of a pattern language appears to apply to any complex engineering task, and has been applied to some of them. It has been especially influential in software engineering where patterns have been used to document collective knowledge in the field.

The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (Book One: The Phenomenon of Life) is his latest work.

He also wrote Linz Cafe.