Toward a Living Architecture

from The World & I Online
November 2005

Architect Christopher Alexander wants to heal the world, piece by piece, one building at a time.

Because contemporary architecture and development are making us sick, the University of California at Berkeley emeritus professor claims. The buildings and communities created in the last hundred years contribute toward societies that are ridden with anxiety and divorced from reality. Alexander criticizes not only banal shopping centers and anonymous tract houses but also "important" buildings like Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, all of which he claims are "against life, insane, image-ridden, hollow"--not to mention ugly.

This critique appears in Alexander's new four-volume book, The Nature of Order, which proposes a new architecture that arises out of the needs and desires of the human beings who live and work within structures rather than from the theories and innovations of the architects who design them.

The purpose of architecture, Alexander holds, is to create "buildings that respect and cherish the land--buildings in which people feel free in themselves and larger in spirit."

"Not that this is easy," he adds, speaking from his farm in West Sussex. "It's quite extraordinarily difficult."

Alexander's role as theorist, critic and thorn in the side of the architectural community has earned him many enemies, from professors who won't teach his books to a recent reviewer in Architectural Record who described the Nature of Order as "a self-deceptive, sloppy, ill-informed and numbingly repetitious book full of contradictions, foggy generalities, and extreme and unsupported assertions." Even those who share many of his goals react with exasperation to his criticisms of the workings of their profession.

Nevertheless, Alexander continues onward in his quest to make the world a more living, more beautiful place, convinced that his theories are not only scientifically established but also the only way to preserve and transform the world.

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