[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.