Put the magic of the city within reach of everyone in a metropolitan area. Do this by means of a collective regional policies which restrict the growth of downtown areas so strongly that no one downtown can grow to serve more than 300,000 people. With this population base, the downtowns will be between two and nine miles apart.

He thinks people ought to own their homes. Arranging this is a simple matter: "Do everything possible to make the traditional forms of rental impossible, indeed, illegal." So you're not surprised when one of his former students says: "Chris's answer to my doubts about The Timeless Way of Building was to say 'Find out your psychological problem that prevents you from agreeing.'"

Alexander's biggest fans are not architects but computer programmers. Unless you are a professional, you can't have any idea how vast his influence is in the field. The most important book written about software in the last thirty years, Design Patterns, takes its form explicitly from A Pattern Language. The authors enumerate thirty "patterns" that make for elegant, robust, even beautiful software. (The mark of a successful new technology today is the appearance of a book called Patterns in ....) These patterns are very like Alexander's: solutions for recurring problems in software development. Cities and software applications are both complex systems that must be broken down into components to be understood. Alexander's ideas lend themselves more readily to software than architecture because a software architect can control every aspect of a project. He need not rule the world to enforce his chosen patterns.

So we're left with a brilliant crank, an inhumane humanist, an immodest prophet of modesty. Even so, A Pattern Language is one of the most interesting books about architecture, and the world, that you're ever likely to read.

(A somewhat different version of this article, not to mention other stuff of this sort, can be found here.)