
Christopher Alexander – Patterns in Architecture (1996) [video] - roshanpisharody
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA
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motohagiography
His book, "The Nature of Order" is also worth reading, even if it goes
practically mystical. There is a theme in thinkers like Alexander, Hofstadter,
and less known but tangentially related for his "constructal law," Bejan,
where there a kind of aesthetic abstraction yields useful heuristics for more
concrete problems. I'm sure there are many others, but these other two were on
the brain recently. (Availability bias, surely)

Hofstadter gives you an intuition about complexity and formal hardness of
problems. Alexander provides intuition about a kind of quality of reasoning,
where from Bejan there is a sense of quality of relational change.

Reading Christopher Alexander is weirdly meditative and good for a
technologists soul. I'm always happy to see him rediscovered.

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kotharia
I discovered Christopher Alexander by accident.

When I was a student, my free time was spent in dusty corners of university
libraries digging up old, forgotten books. I found many gems this way
(including the venerable TAOCP. I only realized how famous it is after reading
the Wikipedia page).

Although he seems to be most famous for the "Pattern Language" book, my
introduction to his work was during my visit to the university's architecture
library, from a slim volume entitled "Notes on the synthesis of form". It
really highlights the magnitude of the task facing the modern
architect/designer/developer. The first half of the book details how for most
of history, design has not been a conscious process but rather an emergent
property arising through a selection process (basically evolution). The
alternative, discussed in the second half of the book, is for a human to sit
down and think through the requirements and design almost de novo - this is
extremely challenging due to the number of interacting variables.

Reading this book gave me a much better appreciation and respect for evolved
techniques (eg. traditional methods of building, farming, etc; even social
norms and traditions), and gave me valuable thoughts on when an evolutionary
approach would work better vs a design approach (similar to Linux's explicit
evolution vs OpenBSD's considered design).

~~~
cpeterso
Stewart Brand's _How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built_ is
another good book about designing for evolution. The book was also adapted
into a 1997 BBC TV series (available Stewart Brand's YouTube channel).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Buildings_Learn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Buildings_Learn)

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sampl
Gotta plug my favorite book of all time here: “A Pattern Language”, by this
speaker, Christopher Alexander et al.

Tons of small, progressive, human-centered hand-drawn architecture patterns in
a hard-bound brick of bible-thin pages.

The book inspired code patterns that you hear about all the time in
engineering, and is a lovely way to think about better cities and homes.

~~~
crazygringo
I would actually recommend his "The Timeless Way of Building" [1] instead. :)
This is the book that explains the philosophy and thinking behind all those
patterns, and where I personally found the vast majority of his insight.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-
Ale...](https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-
Alexander/dp/0195024028/)

~~~
natch
YES! Fantastic book and such enjoyable reading. And I love the built-in
lifehack it suggests for reading just certain passages and type styles if you
are in a hurry, then diving deeper on the sections you need to. I have both
books and would find it hard to choose just one. A Pattern Language is more
famous but this one is a really good complement to it.

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mattip
He was the planner for the village I live in [0]. Did a great job in the early
80’s laying out the patterns to encourage the village to become a community,
the concept of clusters of houses is a great way to build units of
cohesiveness.

[0] [http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/moshav-
shorashim.html](http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/moshav-shorashim.html)

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billman
Since we are on the Christopher Alexander love fest, I would like to share a
book I purchased a couple years ago by him. It's not a well known as his other
stuff, but equally rich.

[https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Life-Beauty-Earth-World-
System...](https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Life-Beauty-Earth-World-
Systems/dp/0199898073)

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plainOldText
He actually has an interesting series called _The Nature of Order_ :

Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life (2002)

Book 2: The Process of Creating Life (2002)

Book 3: A Vision of a Living World (2005)

Book 4: The Luminous Ground (2004)

~~~
samatman
I consider these the most important books published this century.

~~~
skilesare
I agree.

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zeristor
I can't for the life of me remember which of his books it was in but I
remember him writing about having guests around and cooking with them, then
eating. This was so different to my life where my Mum spent the time in the
kitchen on her own, it just sounded far more convivial, a different way of
living that I yearned for.

Does anyone remember which book and chapter it was in?

GTFA gives me this link on kitchens by Christoper Alexander:

[https://www.thekitchn.com/christopher-
ale-164084](https://www.thekitchn.com/christopher-ale-164084)

Although this isn't what I was after

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zeristor
I came for the software architure ideas, and stayed for how people relate to
each other, and building are woven into people's lives.

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misja111
"At the core […] is the idea that people should design for themselves their
own houses, streets and communities. This idea […] comes simply from the
observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by
architects but by the people."

— Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language

So true, and it applies to software development as well.

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skilesare
I wrote a book based on a bunch of his stuff that is a pattern language for a
new post-capitalism financial system.(And yes it is blockchainy)

Amazon: [https://amzn.to/2u5HBHY](https://amzn.to/2u5HBHY) Free here:
[https://skilesare.github.io/immortality/](https://skilesare.github.io/immortality/)
Shortcut to the pattern language:
[https://skilesare.github.io/immortality/the_pattern_language...](https://skilesare.github.io/immortality/the_pattern_language/)

I'd also highly recommend Thriving Systems Theory and Metaphor-Driven Modeling
by Leslie J. Waguespack that is based on his ideas in Nature of Order.

[https://amzn.to/2ujrTZ0](https://amzn.to/2ujrTZ0)

