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Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander Quotes

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Famous Christopher Alexander Quotes

“It is possible to make buildings by stringing together patterns, in a rather loose way. A building made like this, is an assembly of patterns. It is not dense. It is not profound. But it is also possible to put patterns together in such a way that many patterns overlap in the same physical space: the building is very dense; it has many meanings captured in a small space; and through this density, it becomes profound.”

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Book:A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
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“Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there. These patterns of events are locked in with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else; they are the atoms and molecules from which a building or a town is made.”

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Author:Christopher Alexander
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“On the geometric level, we see certain physical elements repeated endlessly, combined in an almost endless variety of combinations. It is puzzling to realize that the elements, which seem like elementary building blocks, keep varying, and are different every time that they occur. If the elements are different every time that they occur, evidently then, it cannot be the elements themselves which are repeating in a building or town; these so-called elements cannot be the ultimate "atomic" constituents of space.”

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Author:Christopher Alexander
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“High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners. They are not cheaper, they do not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view.”

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Book:A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
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“We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial.”

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Book:Notes on the Synthesis of Form
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“Yet still, there are those special secret moments in our lives, when we smile unexpectedly-when all our forces are resolved. A woman can often see these moments in us, better than a man, better than we ourselves, even. When we know these moments, when we smile, when we are not on guard at all-these are the moments when our most important forces show themselves; whatever it is you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it-for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie, and how they can be loosed.”

KnowsMenStillsImportantMomentsShowsLyingCertainForceSecretKnowledgeOur LivesSpecialRepeatsMoments In Our Lives
Book:The Timeless Way of Building
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“It is a common experience that attempts to solve just one piece of a problem first, then others, and so on, lead to endless involutions. You no sooner solve one aspect of a thing, than another point is out of point. And when you correct that one, something else goes wrong. You go round and round in circles, unable to produce a form that is thoroughly right.”

FirstsProblemFormCommonPiecesProduceAspectRoundsSolveCirclesEndlessJust OneOne PieceCommon Experience
Author:Christopher Alexander
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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 following this way. And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.”

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Book:The Timeless Way of Building
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“The structure of life I have described in buildings - the structure which I believe to be objective - is deeply and inextricably connected with the human person, and with the innermost nature of human feeling.”

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Book:The luminous ground: an essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe
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“The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.”

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Author:Christopher Alexander
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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 simply in that they all animate space. It is this animated space that has its functional effect upon the world, that determines the way things work, that governs the presence of harmony and life.”

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Author:Christopher Alexander
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