Advanced Graduate Seminar on Theory of Urban Design

7-page paper by Christopher Alexander, one of his first attempts to define the Centering Process.

13-page text with doodling and sketches, focusing on the speed and not the thinking aspect of the process.

6-page notes on “Visions”, a recording of the exchange of ideas between instructors and students in the course of the seminar.

Theoretical basis and key assumptions for the process of urban growth, tested initially in the San Francisco Waterfront experimental project in 1979, in which the formation of larger urban wholes was highlighted as an overriding rule. This process was further ...

Outdoor space is positive when it is shaped just as a room is shaped. It has a contained character, it is bounded by walls, fences, natural vegetation, enclosure of some kind. It looks into other positive spaces, some larger, some ...

The sixth volume of “The Center for Environmental Structure Series” on architecture published by Oxford University Press, “A New Theory of Urban Design” attempts to recapture the process by which cities develop organically. The venerable cities of the past, such ...

“The Phenomenon of Life”, the first volume of “The Nature of Order” series proposes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life and sets this understanding of order as an intellectual basis for ...

“The Process of Creating Life”, the second volume of “The Nature of Order” series presents a dynamic theory of living structure. It begins with an analysis of transformations, which occur in nature, and the distinction between structure-preserving transformations, responsible for ...

Christopher Alexander referred to it as a “playful and simple way of following the fundamental process, which says that at each step, strong centers are to be created, step by step, in space”. He did the first doodle very fast, in ...

Christopher Alexander referred to it as a “playful and simple way of following the fundamental process, which says that at each step, strong centers are to be created, step by step, in space”. In the second doodle the possible unity of ...

Christopher Alexander referred to it as a “playful and simple way of following the fundamental process, which says that at each step, strong centers are to be created, step by step, in space”. The five steps of the third and final ...