We are on the threshold of a new way of thinking about, learning, and practicing architecture. Ready to abandon design based on often-irrelevant images for a more meaningful paradigm, we find answers in combining timeless truths with recent scientific results. These explain how architecture can re-attach itself to both humanity and nature. It chronicles research results that can change our built environment for the better. “Unified Architectural Theory” is an innovative approach to the basis of architecture, permitting individual students and architects to assert their creativity in pursuing adaptive and sustainable design. 

This course introduces new results that are shaping how buildings are to be conceived from now and in the future. Contemporary topics entering the architecture profession from mathematics and the sciences include biophilia, form languages, fractals, neuroscience, and design patterns. This course is designed to provide students with the theoretical foundation necessary to succeed in future architectural and design practice. 

The topic is not an easy one to talk about in such a way that its full complexity is revealed. It is a difficult and comprehensive subject that engages the whole of architectural production from theory to content, ideas to materials. An added burden on the student is that the discipline itself is barely emerging, with ongoing contradictions and polemics among the experts. The categories of subjects in our readings are meant to bring clarity and some form of categorization to this issue, but they do not exhaust the subject. Therefore, it will be necessary for students to use their critical and analytical powers to a greater degree than is normal.

Unified Architectural Theory: Form, Language, Complexity—a Companion to Christopher Alexander's "The Phenomenon of Life: the Nature of Order, Book 1" 

Unified Architectural Theory re-invents architecture by uncovering its forgotten languages. Organized in 44 sections, this book contains lecture notes and readings from a course based on Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order, Book 1”. The textbook was put together from existing articles published online and in paper journals, along with lectures developed when the course was first taught in 2012. Having almost all of the book available free online makes this an excellent project for international students to follow. Our other textbook, Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order, Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life” (2001) is not free, but must be either found at a local library, or purchased. It is soon to be available as an ebook, thus facilitating students situated anywhere around the world. 

Lecture series, “Form, Language, Complexity: Unified Architectural Theory” — Syllabus 

Teaching the course this time around (in 2021), I am recording brief weekly videolectures and making them freely available to international students. This way, even though they are not following the paid academic course, they will have a better idea of what my students and I discuss during our class meetings. Most important, the material necessary to participate in our class projects on measuring the complexity of Form Languages and the Regional Adaption Index is also made available for anyone to use. 

We will be reading 2 textbooks: 

  • Christopher Alexander (2001) The Nature of Order, Book 1: The Phenomenon of Life, Center for Environmental Structure, Berkeley, California. 
  • Nikos Salingaros (2013) Unified Architectural Theory: Form, Language, Complexity, Sustasis Press, Portland, Oregon. Shortened versions of several chapters are posted online by ArchDaily and Architexturez. 

Together with some free chapters from two of my other books: ATOA = A Theory of Architecture (2006, 2014), and AAAD = Anti-architecture and Deconstruction (2004, 2014).