Influence : Architecture

Christopher Alexander's work has widely influenced architects and developers. His book A Pattern Language in particular has been used as the basis for designing housing developments that aim to recreate the richness of experience found in traditional settlements. Alexander's early writings on design were also very influential in the fields of computer science and programming, helping to establish ideas around modular programming, design patterns, and incremental development approaches like extreme programming. More recently, some have explored connections between Alexander's ideas about "deep geometrical structures" and object-oriented programming concepts.

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Influence : Architecture

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Influence[edit]

Architecture[edit]
Alexander's work has widely influenced architects; those that acknowledge his influence include
Sarah Susanka,[8] among others.
Architecture critic Peter Buchanan, in an essay for The Architectural Review's 2012 campaign
The Big Rethink, depicts the challenge posed by Alexander's work as follows:
"Even architects not immune to the charms of the places depicted, are loath to pursue the folksy
aesthetic they see as implied and do not want to engage with such primitive construction
although the systemic collapse now unfolding may force that upon them. The daunting challenge
for architects then, if such a thing is even possible to realise, would be to recreate in a more
contemporary idiom both the richness and quality of experience suggested by the pattern
language."[9]
In the UK the developers Living Villages have been highly influenced by Alexander's work and
used A Pattern Language as the basis for the design of The Wintles in Bishops Castle,
Shropshire.

Computer science[edit]
Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form was required reading for researchers in computer
science throughout the 1960s. It had an influence[10] in the 1960s and 1970s on programming
language design, modular programming, object-oriented programming, software engineering and
other design methodologies. Alexander's mathematical concepts and orientation were similar to
Edsger Dijkstra's influential A Discipline of Programming.[11]
A Pattern Languages greatest influence in computer science is the design patterns movement.[12]
Alexander's philosophy of incremental, organic, coherent design also influenced the extreme
programming movement.[13] The Wiki was invented[14][15] to allow the Hillside Group to work on
programming design patterns. More recently the "deep geometrical structures" as discussed in
The Nature of Order have been cited as having importance for object-oriented programming,
particularly in C++.[16]
Will Wright wrote that Alexander's work was influential in the origin of The Sims computer
game, and in his later game Spore.[17]
Alexander often leads his own software research, far from mainstream computing, such as the
1996 Gatemaker project with Greg Bryant.[18]