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It covers Alexander’s migration to England in 1938, personal and cultural influences in his thinking and artistic sensibility, and specific references to music and German painters. The discussion explores how Alexander learned to draw expressive diagrammatic lines before computers, including photostat and ink editing methods. It also examines Alexander’s book-making process, emphasizing experiments in format, typography, spacing, and the emotional closeness of books, alongside the fluid relationship between image and text.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/christopher-alexander-in-conversation-with-rem-koolhaas-and-hans-ulrich-obrist/657867/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/christopher-alexander-in-conversation-with-rem-koolhaas-and-hans-ulrich-obrist/657867.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Quinn Holloway","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-30","2026-10-26",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":8},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"Why did Christopher Alexander’s family move to England in 1938?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"His family moved to England in 1938 because of the Nazis.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How did Christopher Alexander create his drawings before the era of computers?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"He used a magic marker and described an earlier workflow using large MIT computers for photostats, then blowing up and editing with black ink to perfect curves.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"What was Christopher Alexander’s approach to designing the format of his books?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"He designed them himself and began with many experiments, using book dummies to refine physical feel, paper weight, print size, typography, spacing, and even flexibility so the book could become emotionally close to the reader.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},657867,1792992680,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":8,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":129,"read_time":46},2336474466712,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_a8503ba1806abce46bf441b54a3ca4cd","CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER IN CONVERSATION WITH REM KOOLHAAS AND HANS ULRICH OBRIST  \nRem Koolhaas: You were born in Austria and educated in England. When did you move to England? What kind of milieu do you came from?  \nChristopher Alexander: My family moved to England in 1938 because of the Nazis. My mother and father were both teachers, my father's still alive, he's 99. They both grew up in Vienna. I know relatively little about my mother's family. I know her father was a banker or something like that. It was a Jewish family but she was brought up as a Catholic. My father's side of the family had a variety of different things. His grandfather was a country doctor on the border of Czechoslovakia.  \nRK: Are there any Austrian elements in your make-up or character or thinking? Is it in any way important for your life?  \nCA: Mahler! Mozart! And perhaps a little touch of Kaiserschmarrn. [laughter]  \nRK: And also Freud and Schiele?  \nCA: Egon Schiele you mean? Yes indeed. But more especially Nolde and Heckel. The German painters.  \nRK: We've been looking at your lines, and we want to talk about your lines and your diagrams and trying to probe where you learn to do this. We've been looking at your books, and we want to talk about your diagrams, the lines of drawings and try to probe where you learn to do this. They are in a way expressive diagrams.  \nCA: I do feel quite strongly related to those painters, and to Klimt also, but it never occurred to me to get help from their work. I just worked, and then in what I did, later I found an affinity, perhaps, in my spirit and in the materials of these men..  \nHUO: I have to specify. We would like to talk about three books: „The Synthesis of Form“,“A Pattern Language” and “The Timeless Way of Building”. When we looked at the lines in „The Synthesis of Form“ we were wondering whether there is a link to Expressionism.  \nCA: Not a conscious one. It's not really an intellectual heritage, it's just that what I feel in here [points to chest] probably is certainly more Austrian than English. It's that inner feeling that you have ... how can one put it into words? It's got to do with a state of mind, which is very dear to me. I remember once, I was traveling and for some reason I had to go to Vienna on the way back, and I hadn't been there for several years. I was so excited to be there, literally as I came down the steps of the airplane I got down and kissed the earth (actually the asphalt), which was very strange. What made me do that? It was quite a long time ago, probably in the late'70s  \nHUO: [showing \"entire village\" illustration] We were wondering, in terms of Expressionism and those lines, how you made these drawings. They're not made with a computer. There is something of woodcuts?  \nCA: I made them with a magic marker. You need a firm hand to do that.[Laughter]  \nRK: This is not quite a hand drawing.  \nCA: This was made before computers. I mean, around 1960 I used to use a computer as big as a building, which all of us used at MIT. But in those days you couldn’t use computers for graphics the way it is possible now in Photoshop. I used to make photostats. If I made a drawing I'd make a photostat, and then I would blow the photostat up and then edit it to perfect the purity of a curve. And then you'd go back and forth between the negative and the positive of the photostats, correcting each one with black ink, so one could perfect the white, and perfect the black. That was a way I sometimes edited these things.  \nHUO: I'm very interested in the idea of books as a medium. In history there has always been architects, like Le Corbusier or now Rem, where the book is not just about their own work but it is a medium. For me they are among the most extraordinary books I know. They are masterpieces, not only in terms of the content but also in terms of the form. This idea of how image and text is associated, that it's black and white, all of that. What gave you the idea? How did it happen? I want to ","cbCaifyYblfmS7w9","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaifyYblfmS7w9","pdf",178327,13,"English","# Conversation and biographical influences\n## Artistic and cultural influences\n## Learning to draw diagrams\n# Book-making process and format","[{\"question\":\"Why did Christopher Alexander’s family move to England in 1938?\",\"answer\":\"His family moved to England in 1938 because of the Nazis.\"},{\"question\":\"How did Christopher Alexander create his drawings before the era of computers?\",\"answer\":\"He used a magic marker and described an earlier workflow using large MIT computers for photostats, then blowing up and editing with black ink to perfect curves.\"},{\"question\":\"What was Christopher Alexander’s approach to designing the format of his books?\",\"answer\":\"He designed them himself and began with many experiments, using book dummies to refine physical feel, paper weight, print size, typography, spacing, and even flexibility so the book could become emotionally close to the reader.\"}]","CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER IN CONVERSATION WITH REM KOOLHAAS AND HANS ULRICH OBRIST | PDF"]