The Last Word: “Christopher Alexander, an architect who was born in Vienna, raised in England and now lives in California, … something of a prophet without honor in his own profession, …produces the kind of books every serious reader should wrestle with once in a while: fat, challenging, grandiose tracts that encourage you to take apart the way you think and put it back together again. Depending on whom you talk to, they’re either canonical or completely off the reservation; among architects, he has some devoted followers and plenty of scornfully dismissive critics, particularly among the champions of the avant-garde. A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building, two seminal works he wrote with five colleagues, have continued to sell well since they were first published in the 1970’s, but despite his position as emeritus professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, their influence on his profession (outside the continuation of some of his ideas in the New Urbanism movement) has faded. Instead, laypeople use A Pattern Language to design their own homes, and The Timeless Way of Building has been a major influence on, of all things, a school of software engineering called object-oriented programming.” NY Times