Central Building of the Eishin Campus, built by Alexander in Japan in 1985

IN THE LATE 1970S, a book with the odd title A Pattern Language became a bible to me and to many of my friends. Ostensibly about architecture, it was really a handbook on how to live.

In the evenings, I’d sit under a lamp and turn its thin, almost translucent pages, looking at lists of design elements like “Cascading Roofs,” “Alcove,” and “Sunny Spot.” These “patterns” could be cobbled together to make a house.

Decades before most Westerners had heard of feng shui, it described how the built world shapes human interaction. It recommended windows on two sides of every room, for instance, because this “creates less glare around people and objects. . . . It allows us to read in detail the minute expressions that flash across people’s faces . . . to understand each other.”

More than a recipe book for designing bungalows with cozy window seats and wide front porches, it was an elegy to the social joy and vanishing higgledy-piggledy beauty we touch in Greek island villages, some urban neighborhoods, and timeless indigenous architecture. The book, still in print, became the best-selling architectural treatise of all time.

Its lead author, architect Christopher Alexander—a critic of much Bauhaus-style modern architecture—may now be the West’s most influential “counternarrative” architectural theorist. He is the inspiration behind the pedestrian-friendly New Urbanism and Sarah Susanka’s bestselling Not So Big House books. The organizational logic of his “Pattern Language” inspired a revolution in software design.

Three years ago, Alexander published The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, the distillation—into four coffee-table sized volumes—of decades of investigation into how beauty is brought into the world. This under-the-radar work, illustrated with beautiful photographs and far more ambitious than A Pattern Language, must be the only serious study in Western architecture to cite the Tao Te Ching and the Hua Yen or Flower Garland Sutra, and to describe a lovely Chinese tower (the Pagoda of the Wild Goose) as having “The smile of the Buddha.” The hunt for beauty had led Alexander to what he sometimes calls the Whole and sometimes calls God.

The Nature of Order begins with deceptive simplicity, explicating fifteen universal design properties, such as alternating repetition, strong centers, and local symmetries, that are found in all beautiful living beings and things, be they the ripples on a sand dune, the lines in a gingko leaf, or a tracing on a blue tile from the Alhambra palace.

The final volume, The Luminous Ground, ends with a description of how beauty evolves from emptiness into form and how all things “unfold” from a fertile, self-organizing, and living Void whose inherent structural patterns are echoed and embodied in all the ten thousand things.

Alexander’s cosmological description—perhaps because it draws its authority from a scientific Westerner’s observation of the natural world—gave me a new appreciation for the Buddhist metaphor of the Jewel Net of Indra and for the kaleidoscopic, inter-nesting lotus worlds described in the Flower Garland Sutra, both of which Alexander cites in his work.

Since the publication of the books, Alexander, professor emeritus of achitecture at the University of California, Berkeley, has argued more and more publicly for the existence of God, not as an old man in the sky, but as an underlying, order-making Presence in the universe. His most recent paper, “Harmony-Seeking Computations,” to be published in the International Journal of Unconventional Computating, argues for that Presence by describing striking commonalities in the evolution of shapes over time—embryos, crystals, geese flying in formation, or complex architectural forms like the plan of Saint Mark’s Square in Venice. I interviewed Alexander, now 71, last May in the village of Binsted, in southern England, where he now lives year-round. His home there, which he shares with his partner, Maggie Moore, was originally a small fifteenth-century farmhouse but has grown over the centuries by accretion, acquiring a Georgian facade and a second story. Sheep grazed outside; one of the downstairs rooms was half-timbered. The floors of the second story were as wavy as the sea.

—Katy Butler

Yesterday you showed me the visitor’s center you designed and built at West Dean Gardens, an old manorial estate that is now a center for traditional English crafts. From the outside, your building, with its walls of stacked flint and arched windows, looked as if it had been there for centuries. You told me that when you were trying to get the archways in the dining room just right, you made various mock-ups and asked yourself which of these curves was likely to be the most “pleasing to God.” This is pretty far from modern architecture’s famous maxim—that form follows function. What does it mean to you to make an arch that is pleasing to God?

Of course I do not mean to say that God is something like an old man with a white beard. It is something deep in the universe, the principle that governs all things. To do anything right, you need to be in touch with that “something.” To help focus one’s attention on this something, it is necessary to find, in your mind, a blankness or emptiness and let the solution arise from that emptiness. So, looking at the arches, I ask myself, “Which of these is closest to my own soul? Which is the most fitting gift to God? Which of them could best make a person whole?” The questions clean out my mind, get rid of the rubbish, extraneous concepts, word-bound ideas, and my own ego—and so allow me the freedom to pay attention to the thing itself.

Is this like the mental freedom from all concepts that Zen aspires to teach?

Let me give you an example from architecture. Some years ago I was building a house in Berkeley, attached to another house, on a very tight lot. The second house was a little small. You’d come into the main house, and go down some stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, you’d turn left and there was the living room of the second house. I made leopards in the floor, yellow ceramic leopards set in stripes of red polished concrete. Very nice. Originally, the idea was that there would be a French door leading from this room out to the garden. There was a lawn, and a very pretty view, and a terrace. But once we were in construction, and standing in the actual room, I noticed a devastating problem. The window where the French door would be was exactly opposite the bottom of the stairs. The result was that the room felt restless, almost like a passage, and left you rattling around feeling a sort of emotional draft. The two openings, now more or less across from each other, did not leave the room any stillness at all.

Milkdrop Coronet, Dr. Harold Edgerton, 1957.

Also, there was a growing feeling that the bank of windows overlooking the garden would do best if there were a window seat along their entire length. But then there could be no French door, and you would not be able to go out to the garden. Now, the consciousness of that would be constantly there as an irritant. These stresses—they’re not big in the panoply of human stress, but little by little they are filling your stress reservoir up to its capacity. The problem was so difficult to solve, I had to stop construction for a few weeks. We tried all kinds of stuff that didn’t work. One day, I said, “You’re going to walk out through the window.” I built a little tiny concrete staircase on the outside of the house, and it went up from the lawn, three steps, maybe four. Had a little railing. From inside, you’d step up on the window seat, open the window, and then get down into the garden.

Really?

It was completely loony, but it absolutely did what was required. So it wasn’t loony at all. It was only convention that said so. It was a very sensible thing, and it is there to this day. The solution to this problem needed a Zen-like freedom, an escape from conventional concepts, and just to do what was required. Nothing more.

I’m going to talk about God in childish words for a minute. God (whatever it is) wants you to do the most appropriate thing. We don’t want to make a mess. And that means it wants us to do all the things that are required in a place as modestly as possible, without screwing it up. I suppose you could call it a religious problem if you believe, as I do, that the purpose of the whole adventure is to make God smile.

In your best-known book from the seventies, A Pattern Language, there’s a lot of emphasis on practical concerns, such as where to put a window. Now you talk in religious terms, and your newer books quote ancient Mahayana Buddhist texts. How did you get from A to B? What were your earliest religious experiences with Buddhist practice?

When I was a boy, I used to bike out into the English countryside and visit churches. I was quite a devout Catholic. But I sort of abandoned it shortly after arriving in the U.S. I came to Berkeley in the sixties to teach at the architecture school, and Zen became one means of exploration for me, and Jungian therapy another, and it’s hard to say which one helped me more. My first Zen teacher came through a book. His name was Hubert Benoit, a French psychiatrist. He wrote The Supreme Doctrine and Let Go. Benoit said that thoughts and language always tie us up in knots. So he devised an exercise where he would ask a person to say a sentence very slowly, keeping it grammatical but choosing words that do not mean anything. Mentally, you stare blankly in your mind’s eye, and if you do the exercise correctly, you won’t be able to remember the last word you said as you are saying the next one. Of course the resulting sentence doesn’t mean anything, but the amazing thing is that by the time you reach the end of the sentence you have completely forgotten the beginning.

It is, in effect, washing your mind out, not allowing you to hold onto any concept, any meaning. I often sit with an empty mind, and I am able to do it fairly easily, in part because as a young man this extremely simple exercise gave me confidence that I could. If I can empty my mind for long enough, many beautiful things then come to fill it, unbidden by me.

And therapy?

I was doing some therapy with a Jungian psychiatrist. I used to go walking around the streets of Berkeley, asking myself, To what extent am I alive right now? I got into the habit of doing things that I otherwise would have been too shy to do. And I noticed that when I didn’t do them, I felt really bad.

It sounds as if there was a subsidiary question, then: What would make me more alive?

Yes, that’s right. I remember an old lady hovering on the edge of the sidewalk and about to step off and she obviously wasn’t comfortable, perhaps afraid of the traffic. I thought, “I ought to help her.” But then I had all these typical American thoughts: What are you talking about? You don’t want to bother her. And I thought, This is ridiculous because I know she needs to be helped, and I’m not going to let that stuff stop me. And so I went over and helped her. It sounds like nothing, but I stood hovering on the sidewalk there for several minutes trying to get the courage to do it.

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