An Inquiry into Christopher Alexander’s Thoughts on the Interactions between Science and Architecture

The present article is an inquiry into one of the relatively neglected aspects of Christopher Alexander, the architect and theorist of the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. An important feature of Alexander is the multifaceted nature of his personality and intellectual life. He is both a distinguished scientist in the field of exact sciences such as mathematics and computers, and a well-known designer and theorist in the field of architecture. His entry into architecture was accompanied by a desire to scientifically streamline the architectural design process, but eventually the path he took led to a structural critique of contemporary science. Despite all the ups and downs along the way, the relationship between science and architecture seems to have always been one of Alexander's main concerns. In response, we intend to explain this relationship by analytical reading of Alexander's life and works here.
The article shows that the most important difference between Alexander the scientist and his peers in the contemporary world is not in his method but in his findings. Alexander, like many modern scientists, works empirically, but his findings reveal the ‘whole’ rather than the meticulous details that are common to many modern studies. Relying on the ‘theory of complexity’, and the challenges and capacities that this theory presents to modern science, Alexander tries to bring back to focus concepts such as ‘beauty’, ‘value’, ‘quality’ and the like, which, in the philosophy of modern science are generally considered as outside of the field of science. In this regard, he introduces architecture as a model that can be a facilitator for scientists and tries to show how architecture can use new scientific paradigms, such as the theory of complexity, to reconstruct and revive itself, and at the time help change the paradigm of science in the world to come.