[ThePhysicist]

I love his pattern language book and I know it inspired people from many fields including but not limited to computer games and architecture.

To a certain degree though it tends to romanticize urban structures that were born strictly out of necessity. For example the Italian old cities with their intricate patterns of small roads, narrow stairwells and tiny houses hugging each other seem quaint and magical to most tourists today, but they were often not designed but born out of pure necessity and economic constraints, and for centuries they housed mostly poor people that probably didn't realize they were surrounded by beautiful "patterns".

If you approach his work with a slightly critical attitude there are many interesting things to discover though.

[tchaffee]

Considering how important asthetics are to Italian culture - bela figura is an idiom that is used often, and Milan is the fashion capitol of the world - the poor people of Italy not only realize they are surrounded by beautiful patterns but they can also point them out and explain why they are efficient and / or useful. The discovery may have been organic, but in the land of Da Vinci don't underestimate just how intentional many design decisions are. And just how cultured and aware the average person is there, regardless of income. The impression one gets after many years living in that culture, is that it is in no way a new thing.

[praptak]

I don't think this contradicts what Alexander says. His reasoning is that good architecture is born by necessity, involvement by users (he's against architect as God) and some group knowledge of what works - that last part is "pattern language" although it doesn't need to be explicitly codified.

[vanderZwan]

I discovered Christopher Alexander through an interest in permaculture back in the mid-2000s while studying art, so yeah, many fields indeed. Reading Notes on the Synthesis of Form, The Timeless Way Of Building and A Pattern Language was enormously influential (it also made my follow-up design master a relative breeze, since it conceptually overlapped with so much other material that we were taught).

The romanticizing issue is very visible, although you can also see it as a product of the dominant architectural mindset of the era the books were written in (or more accurately: a reaction to it). It's a lot easier to look past it with that in mind.

[mschnell]

Isn't this one of the key points though: the patterns emerge because of necessity and constraints during construction and use at the location where they are?