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27 quotes by Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Christopher Wolfgang Alexander (born October 4, 1936 in Vienna, Austria) is an architect noted for his theories about design as well as over 200 building projects around the world. Reasoning that users know more about the buildings they need than any architect could, he produced and validated (in collaboration with Sarah Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein) a "pattern language" to empower anyone to design and build at any...
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This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the... →

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Nowadays, the process of growth and development almost never seems to manage to create this subtle balance between the importance of the individual... →

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It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns, beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel alive, except by... →

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There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and the same today as it has ever been. The great traditional buildings of the... →

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To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in... →

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A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed in a timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but... →

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Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.

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To work our way towards a shared language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life.

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I believe that all centers that appear in space - whether they originate in biology, in physical forces, in pure geometry, in color - are alike... →

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We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly... →

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But in practice master plans fail - because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the... →

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From a sequence of these individual patterns, whole buildings with the character of nature will form themselves within your thoughts, as easily as... →

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In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger... →

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