Nikos Salingaros is a mathematics professor and architecture theorist. His career has crossed disciplines: after starting out as a painter, Salingaros earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and published work in mathematics and physics. In 1983 Salingaros helped edit Christopher Alexander's book The Nature of Order (here are Salingaros' notes on the book), and thereafter began a career as a noted architecture theorist in his own right. Salingaros is an advocate for "new urbanism" in architecture, and he champions the ideas of architect Léon Krier (the "godfather of new urbanism") with the "pattern language" theory of Christopher Alexander ^(wiki). The excellent arts blog 2Blowhards conducted a fascinating five-part interview with Salingaros: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Salingaros just published a new book, A Theory of Architecture (2Blowhards discusses it here) with a preface written by HRH the Prince of Wales ^(wiki).
posted by jayder on Nov 5, 2006 - 13 comments

A WEBSITE DEVOTED TO REBUILDING THE EARTH. Christopher Alexander is about to publish the long awaited The Nature of Order. At the OOPSLA 1996 conference he proposed "a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world"and asked the help of the software community to take over the profession of architecture and to generate tools that would enable us once again to create a living built environment. The patternlanguage.com site has not been the genesis bomb I was hoping it would be but it's early days yet.
posted by worldsystema on Oct 20, 2001 - 17 comments