Christopher Alexander

I've just received a preparation pack for the SPARK workshop, including a new copy of Christopher Alexander's book Timeless Way of Building, first published in 1979. I wonder how many of the SPARK participants have looked at Alexander's later material, including his New Theory of Urban Design (1987), and his magnificent new 4-volume work The Nature of Order.

A few years ago I wrote

Christopher Alexander's work is frequently cited in the software world, usually after a delay of about 15 years. Thus Notes was used by Ed Yourdon and Tom De Marco in the 1970s, to support a view of top-down design. Patterns made a serious entry into the software world the early 1990s. His book on Urban Design has not yet achieved such popularity, although I think it is extremely relevant to business and IT planning. In the past, Alexander has expressed some ambivalence and suspicion about the use of his work by software engineers. More recently, he has been persuaded to make occasional keynote speeches at software conferences and to write prefaces for software books. It may even be true that some software practitioners understand his work better than most architects. However, he is clearly troubled by the fact that software practitioners mostly only pick up fragments of his work, and ignore the holistic aspects of his thinking that he regards as crucial.

 

Here are some of the themes of Alexander's thinking that I see as particularly relevant to SOA.

1. Under the right conditions, complex order emerges from a series of simple steps. A given structure at a given moment is in a partially evolved state.

2. Each step is generally structure-preserving - it builds upon the differentiation and coherence (strength) of the existing structure.

3. Each step brings greater differentiation and greater coherence (strength). Alexander calls this the Fundamental Differentiating Process. (See Nature of Order, Book 2, page 216).

4. Alexander defines structure in terms of a network of centres. Alexander's notions of structure-preservation, differentiation and coherence are explained in terms of this notion of structure. (See "Centers: The Architecture of Services and the Phenomenon of Life," FTPOnline, Richard C. Murphy, March 2004)

5. A key role of governance is then to establish and maintain the conditions under which this fundamental differentiating process can work. (See my articles in the Architecture Journal: Metropolis and SOA Governance and Taking Governance to the Edge).

 

See also Christopher Alexander as Teacher (May 2004), Christopher Alexander 1936-2022 (March 2022)