“Next, several acts of building, each one done to repair and magnify the product of the previous acts, will slowly generate a larger and more complex whole than any single act can generate,”

In an interview with his biographer, Alexander noted, “We give names to things but we don’t give many names to relationships.”

The seeds of the Columbus myth seem to grow from Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) (online here). Alexander Everett, Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain, had invited Irving to Madrid in the hopes that Irving would translate a recently published collection of documents on Columbus.

Each unit in each tree that I have described, moreover, is the fixed, unchanging residue of some system in the living city (just as a house is the residue of the interactions between the members of a family, their emotions and their belongings; and a freeway is the residue of movement and commercial exchange).

Before the publication of the ‘Gang of Four’ book that popularised software patterns [4], Richard Gabriel described Christopher Alexander’s patterns in 1993 as a basis for reusable object‐oriented software in the following way:Habitabilityisthecharacteristicofsourcecodethatenablesprogrammers,coders,bug­fixers,andpeoplecomingtothecodelaterinitslifetounderstanditsconstructionandintentionsandtochangeitcomfortablyandconfidently.

Wiki is perhaps the only web idiom that is not a child of BBS culture. It derives historically from pre-web models of hypertext, with an emphasis on the pre. The immediate ancestor of wiki was a Hypercard stack maintained by Ward Cunningham that attempted to capture community knowledge among programmers. Its philosophical godfather was the dead-tree hypertext A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander in the 1970s.

Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, claims that Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, successfully campaigned for The Guardian to scrub her name from one of their bombshell data-abuse stories.

“participation architectures.”