Architect, writer and philosopher, Christopher Alexander has taken a bottom up approach to design, identifying what makes individual components of a design good, and building from that a series of patterns that lead to good architectural design. His best known work A Pattern Language was written in 1977 and compiled thousands of these patterns as the basis for future work.
His work has influenced Computer Science, especially object oriented programming, the design patterns movement and the extreme programming movement. His work was influential in the development of the Wiki, SimCity and its immensely popular spin-of The Sims. His works Notes on the Synthesis of Form, and the Nature of Order underpin significant developments in computer science but Alexander himself has applied them more broadly to investigate religious and philosphical questions from a new basis.
