Everyone programmer who's picked up the "Gang of Four" Design Patterns book knows about Prof. Alexander's work to some extent. Briefly, he is a professor and sometimes hands-on architect with background in mathematics and CAD, who has some really cool ideas about form, context and design. I always like to read original sources, so I finally ordered a copy of The Timeless Way of Building, which is the principal book describing the patterns concept -- the first in a trilogy that covers theory, a pattern language (A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction) and concrete examples based on work at the campus of the University of Oregon (The Oregon Experiment ).
He's got several other books, which I've found quite interesting based on flipping through them at the bookstore and reading reviews. Like the overzealous Stephen Wolfram, Alexander has recently published one of those meta-scientific magna opera that purport to explain all the interesting and complex phenomena of the universe by reduction to a single principle: patterns. It's a four volume, 2,000 page work called The Nature of Order. Hey maybe he's right. These reductionist theories always seem too pat to me in the final analysis (though they can be comforting), but that doesn't mean there's not at least some grain of truth in them.
His earlier Notes on the Synthesis of Form is worth a browse at the bookstore or the excerpted pages available on Amazon.com (speaking from its appeal to me as a geek and programmer), but I wouldn't pay $20 for the softcover. A lot of what he says in this book can be derived from a study of Darwin's and other biologists' work on adaptation and from Aristotle's work on form and purpose (google "Aristotle Four Causes" -- briefly they are form, purpose/intention, material and maker). The opening line to the first chapter could almost be a quote from Aristotle:
The ultimate object of design is form.
Another good quote off the same page:
Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem.
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