The Concept of Order: Christopher Alexander and the New Science

Christopher Wolfgang Alexander (born October 4, 1936 in Vienna, Austria) is an architect noted for his theories about design. He wrote his seminal book titled A Pattern Language to empower anyone to design and build at any scale. More recently, his quest for the nature of order is notable among his writings. In The Nature of Order: an Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (2003-04), which includes The Phenomenon of Life, The Process of Creating Life, A Vision of a Living World and The Luminous Ground, he puts forth a new theory about the nature of space and describes how this theory influences thinking about architecture, building, planning, and the way in which we view the world in general. The mostly static patterns from A Pattern Language have been amended by more dynamic sequences, which describe how to work towards patterns (which can roughly be seen as the result of sequences). Sequences, like patterns, promise to be tools of wider scope than building (just as his theory of space goes beyond architecture). This paper attempts to review Alexander’s theory in a wider frame encompassing developments in technology as well as those in philosophical thought.