One of the great theorists of architecture, the city, and nature recently passed away on March 17, 2022, at the age of 85. Born in Vienna on October 4, 1936, Christopher Alexander lived a long life of singular contributions, offering visionary ideas about cities that challenged the mainstream of architectural practice.
Christopher Alexander swam against the current throughout his career as an architect and theorist—beginning in the 1960s with his break from the Modern Movement. Shortly before, Jane Jacobs had published her The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a devastating critique of the visualist tendencies and the disregard for the connections between buildings and the social life of the street in the normative theories of modernism—in itself a revolutionary movement with technological and compositional innovations, but one deeply detached from the relationship between the built environment and social life that cities had historically fostered.
