Christopher Alexander wins Vincent Scully Prize

          Central Building of the Eishin Campus, built by Alexander in Japan in 1985. Source:  www.tricycle.com

The National Building Museum has made a fascinating selection for its 2009 Vincent Scully laureate and all of us here are eager to share the news as an auspicious, consensus-building way to remind our constituents of Christopher Alexander's unique and under-appreciated contribution to design pedagogy and practice.   The article form Metropolis Magazine attached sums it up well.  As far as I know Mr. Alexander does not and would not label himself a classicist and traditionalist. In any case, I make no such presumption in marking this tribute. Instead, I recognize his steadfast iconoclasm in the face of all dogma including the hegemony of modernism which inevitably shaped his training and predominant collegial milieu. There is in his work always a central place for nature, the human figure , and the applied endurance of  time-tested patterns,   contrasting his work with most of what has been the overall design zeitgeist of his lifetime.  Combined with his innovative embrace of technology and its resulting tools, his role as universal, provocative asset is secure. Congratulations to him the Museum's selection committee for such overdue recognition.  PWG 

Comments

[Terry Kearns]

Thanks for saluting Mr. Alexander. The link to the article is broken though. Should be:

http://www.metropolismag.com/pov/20090831/christopher-alexander-wins-vincent-scully-prize

[Nikos Salingaros]

It is great to see Christopher's work recognized among the Classical Architecture community. Some of us who straddle both groups -- Classical and Alexandrian -- have long recognized the fundamental need for human-scale architecture that is independent of style. Our enemies, on the other hand, have long tried to pigeonhole all traditional practice as expired "styles" in order to marginalize us, even though Demetri Porphyrios' classic essay emphasized that "Classicism is not a style". I sincerely hope that traditional practitioners will find in Christopher's work some powerful tools both for design, and for fighting against the onslaught of inhuman architecture that now happens to be fashionable.

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