The Gatemaker Project

The Gatemaker project provides an enlightening lens through which to examine the interplay of ideas between Christopher Alexander and computing, over the last half-century. Interest in his work became intense by 1996, so his team secured funding for a research project: a computer-based design tool for improving the built-environment, which treats feeling as an objective metric. The application made significant progress along these lines, unfortunately unmatched in any other computer project since. There is much confusion about the program, within both computing and architectural circles. This is because, like many of Alexander's projects, Gatemaker unveiled a battle between different systems of thought.