Saying the Obvious All the Time

As a teenager at Cambridge University in the 1950s, Christopher Alexander (1936–2022) became fascinated by the question “What makes something beautiful?” To his surprise, he found that no serious scholars offered answers he found compelling; many didn’t even seem interested in taking up the question. When the young Alexander went to see the famous analytic philosopher A.J. Ayer, Ayer dismissed his question, seeing it as some kind of “verbal problem” to be resolved by analyzing language use.

Alexander came to feel that there was something deeply wrong with contemporary architecture, whose practitioners didn’t care about the question of how to make places with “beauty” and “life.” Architects and designers, Alexander said, saw beauty as something subjective, a matter of purely personal taste that could not be meaningfully discussed—there was no possibility of adjudicating rationally among differing aesthetic preferences. Yet Alexander felt that centuries-old buildings like the Alhambra were more beautiful than anything built since World War II. Alexander wanted to disc…