Christopher Alexander’s carpet collection, at its final state included about 80 carpets, most of them Turkish carpets, or carpets with a pronounced “Turkic” character

Christopher Alexander started collecting carpets because of his desire to learn from them. He felt that they had something to teach him. He was never interested in the classification of carpets, where they came from, or on their type. He only was interested in those pieces which had the most to teach him, in his work as an artist. And he found himself searching for earlier and earlier carpets, because he discover slowly that the earlier carpets had a deeper structure, were more beautiful, and had far more of that complex and important structure, from which there was so much to learn.
Although in the collection there were Spanish carpets, Persian, Caucasian, Central Asian and European carpets, the majority were Turkish carpets, with a preference to the early village pieces, which constitute the real core of authentic Turkish carpet production from the 14th to the 17th century. .