CS 411:
Software
Architecture
Design

Bilkent University

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Instructor:
Dr. Bedir Tekinerdoğan
bedir@cs.bilkent.edu.tr

Course Assistants
Bugra M. Yıldız
Elif Demirli

Mimar Sinan M.C.Escher Christopher Alexander

Christopher Alexander

Software architecture is in essence about architecture. Although software has its own specific characteristics, in order to provide a deep understanding of software  architecture design it is worthwhile to look beyond our discipline of computer science. Surely an important related discipline is architecture in civil engineering. Over the last decade Christopher Alexander has had a broad impact on software development. Christopher Alexander has designed and built more than two hundred buildings throughout the world and has been the recipient of innumerable architectural prizes and honors including the gold medal for research of the American Institute of Architects, awarded in 1970.

The widely used concepts like of design Patterns, Architectural Patterns, are basically inspired from his seminal works The Timeless Way of Building and a Pattern Language. The former represents the novel architecture design method, the latter presents concrete patterns of architecture.

Alexander is the author of the book 'The Nature of Order' which will be published in November 2002. It will be one of the most important documents in this century, and if you have the opportunity I would recommend to get an exemplar of the book. Alexander's central thesis is that there is something fundamentally wrong with twentieth century architectural design methods and practices. Despite of many other books on architecture which are mainly 'mechanical' in a sense, this books seems to concern a more holistic perspective on design. In addition, it is not only considered as guidelines for architecture design, but defines also a new kind of philosophy (for a new age). In my understanding, it breaks with the overly exaggerated rationalistic movements of the last century and puts meta-physical aspects balanced with scientific reasoning into focus. By means of experiments he shows that this holistic approach to design works, that objectivity exists, and that people should strive for this to have a life with order.

 

Alexander is also the author of A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets in which he maintains that carpet design have degenerated over time and become mechanical in a sense. He shows nice examples of old original (Seljuk) Turkish carpets which have the 'living' character and shows (awesome) experiments in his book to validate his thesis. The book is quite expensive, but surely, this is really a great book. (He has lived for 6 months in Konya to study the old carpets).

 

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