Christopher Alexander Quotes

All architecture has a public nature, I believe, so I would like to make a public space.

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

A city, far from being a cluster of buildings, is actually a sequence of spaces enclosed and defined by buildings.

I think architecture is one of the predominant orderings of social space. It can construct and contain our experiences. It defines our days and nights. It literally puts us in our place.

Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me... the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture's power to construct our days and nights.

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.

The English truly understand the dynamic between buildings and land.

Any work of architecture that has with it some discussion, some polemic, I think is good. It shows that people are interested, people are involved.

Architecture arouses sentiments in man. The architect's task therefore, is to make those sentiments more precise.

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn't find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

Architecture is a ride - a physical ride and an intellectual ride.

The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s.

The body moves through space every day, and in architecture in cities that can be orchestrated. Not in a dictatorial fashion, but in a way of creating options, open-ended sort of personal itineraries within a building. And I see that as akin to cinematography or choreography, where episodic movement, episodic moments, occur in dance and film.

Buildings are always better than drawings and models.

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.

People outside the profession of architecture perhaps often lack the understanding of how their physical environment comes into being. What are the processes, the concerns and considerations? What are the parameters that shape the world around them?

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

I graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in art. I was really headed toward an architecture degree, but when I did the requirements for the major, I realized I was more interested in how people live in buildings than in making buildings. I was more interested in the interactions that happened inside the structures.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

I'm trying to create architecture as landscape. But I'm not copying nature.

Chaoyang Park Plaza is about how to carry the traditional culture into a new format in modern architecture. Instead of building a boundary between the city and the park, I tried to design this building to emerge from the natural landscape.