Christopher Alexander, who died in March at 85, offered ways to unf*ck the world

By the time I became aware of him, Alexander was a fading legend, roaming somewhere in the discursive pantheon but absent from the drama at center stage. He would soon retire from his position down the coast at Berkeley, after nearly 40 years of teaching, and head back to England, completing a tour of three distinct Anglo-American academic cultures. Alexander was born in Austria but moved with his parents at the age of two to England in 1938; two decades later, he completed degrees in architecture and mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

He was ahead of a trend—the 1960s would be a blockbuster decade for mathematical and computational research in architecture—but he was also following in the footsteps of a famous compatriot, the Austrian British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Uncompromising and outspoken, both figures wielded logic in the hope of reconstructing the fallen human world on a basis of rationality. Just as Wittgenstein played “the philosopher who read nothing,” Alexander habitually wore a mask of naivete when delivering cutting criticism that in truth sprang from deep erudition and empathy. “I don’t fully follow what you just talked about,” he told Eisenman during their epoch-defining debate of 1982, after the latter had finished expounding on post-structuralist theory. Then the pivot: Alexander accused Eisenman of “fucking up the world,” to crowd applause. Equal parts hippie-mystic and do-gooder technocrat, Alexander effected a countercultural synthesis that met with popular appeal. Few architects can say as much.

Alexander has long posed a conundrum for architectural historians. When and why did he fall out of favor? The answer surely has something to do with his preference for origins and innocence during a period of great sophistication in architectural theory. Alexander was at heart a structuralist anthropologist turned builder. His breakout book, 1964’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form, applied his novel methods to the design of a village in India. European towns and domestic vernacular forms loomed large in his design imaginary. By construing entire sociocultural totalities as his “clients” and working on behalf of their “interests,” Alexander took the architect’s fiduciary duty to its extreme. This approach made sense in the era of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Bernard Rudofsky, but not so much after Jacques Derrida and Edward Said. By the 1990s, Alexander appeared suspiciously paternalistic at best. He was an exemplar of what would later be termed “the public architect”—a conflicted figure in our neoliberal world and simply beyond the ken of an architectural culture defined by the alliance between conceptual art, French philosophy, and the figure of the starchitect.

We’re no longer in that era, and it may be time to revisit Alexander’s lessons. Be warned, however: He had lots of lessons. Alexander’s hesitation to reinvent the wheel of architectural form was paired with a perverse joy in tinkering with methods. For a few years he parsed the built world into mathematical tree structures only to declare a few years later that “the city is not a tree.” He eventually landed on the conceptual model of social networks, and his pattern-language approach inspired a generation of object-oriented programmers. Alexander, one of the first architect-programmers, was also among the first critics to strike a blow against computation, publishing a diatribe in 1964 under the title “A Much Asked Questions about Computers and Design” calling computer-using architects “misguided, dangerous, and foolish.” (The lesson, in this case, was not to abstain from computation but to avoid foolishness.)