[seumars]

My intro to Alexander was also through Notes on the Synthesis of Form, though personally I found it to be really antiquated. Shortly after I found out he distanced himself from a lot of the design methodology work he did in the 60s:

>‘There is so little in what is called ‘design methods’that has anything useful to say about how to design buildings that I never evenread the literature anymore [...] I would say forget it, forget the whole thing.’

That's not to say the literature and was/is immensely inspiring, so much so that his name comes up within software engineering as much as it does within architecture.

[refset]

He described this distancing from the methodology, and consequently what he considered the salient message, in a preface for a later printing of the book [0]:

> Today, almost ten years after I wrote this book, one idea stands out clearly for me as the most important in the book: the idea of the diagrams. [...] I reject the whole idea of design methods as a subject of study, since I think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from the practice of design. [...] No one will become a better designer by blindly following this method, or indeed by following any method blindly. [...] In the process of trying to create such diagrams or patterns for yourself, you will reach the central idea which this book is all about.

I think this explains why Inkscape is my favourite piece of software :)

[0] https://monoskop.org/images/f/ff/Alexander_Christopher_Notes...