Chris Alexander's Books

Ken Mayers, my utility infielder colleague at Digital Equipment Corporation, entered my office one day and said “It’s time you read Chris Alexander’s Timeless Way of Building. You are asking us to build these far out visual interfaces and you don’t know the first thing about pattern languages.”

“OK, I’ll bite – what is a pattern language?” I asked in irritation.

“Read the book!” Ken laughed as he turned around and walked away.

I got the book and fell in love with the content and the book design in a way I’ve never experience with a book. Alexander designed the book to be read in different ways depending on how much time you had.

If you only have ten minutes, he suggeste4d you read the one page chapter summary and inhale the photos of representative architecture designs. If you have thirty minutes, you flip the pages within the chapters and read the couple of italicized sentences on each page. Then, if you have three hours you read the whole book.

So I started the ten minute read gaining a quick idea of what a pattern language is about. Then, I came to a screeching halt about halfway through the book as a photo and brief description of the “most alive” design Alexander ever encountered – a carp pond in Japan. At least 90% of the people that I’ve recommended the book to stop in the same place.

More recently, Chris was honored by the ACM Conference OOPSLA for his contribution to the theory of design patterns in computing. In an emotional speech, Chris related how pleased he was that at least one professional discipline has embraced his core ideas. He is deeply disappointed that he life’s research has not significantly affected his won profession of architecture. At the end of his talk he challenged the professional programmers and computer scientists in the audience:

“Please forgive me; I'm going to be very direct and blunt for a horrible second. It could be thought that the technical way in which you currently look at programming is almost as if you were willing to be “guns for hire.” In other words, you are the technicians. You know how to make the programs work. “Tell us what to do daddy, and we'll do it.” That is the worm in the apple.

“What I am proposing here is something a little bit different from that. It is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing. That would be remarkable. It would turn the world around, and make living structure the norm once again, throughout society, and make the world worth living in again.

“This is an extraordinary vision of the future, in which computers play a fundamental role in making the world -- and above all the built structure of the world -- alive, humane, ecologically profound, and with a deep living structure. I realize that you may be surprised by my conclusion. This is not what I am, technically, supposed to have been talking about to you. Or you may say, Well, great idea, but we're not interested. I hope that is not your reaction. I hope that all of you, as members of a great profession of the future, will decide to help me, and to help yourselves, by taking part in this enormous world-wide effort. I do think you are capable of it. And I do not think any other professional body has quite the ability, or the natural opportunity for influence, to do this job as it must be done.”