52 Quotes by Christopher Alexander

Everyone is aware that most of the built environment today lacks a natural order, an order which presents itself very strongly in places that were built centuries ago.

But in practice master plans fail – because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.

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.

I mean, making simulations of what you’re going to build is tremendously useful if you can get feedback from them that will tell you where you’ve gone wrong and what you can do about it.

There are geologists who can pick up a rock and say, ‘Yes, there’s oil under there.’ A geologist who has been studying those kinds of rocks for 10 or 20 years is able to make that pronouncement.

Speaking as a builder, if you start something, you must have a vision of the thing which arises from your instinct about preserving and enhancing what is there... If you're working correctly, the feeling doesn't wander about.

Images in the 20th century had a unique power where image became divorced from reality, and often more important than reality... Buildings were judged - at least by members of our own profession - more by the way they looked in magazines than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.