[12] Reasoning that users are more sensitive to their needs than any architect could be,[13][14][15] he collaborated with his students Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid King, and Shlomo Angel to produce a pattern language that would empower anyone to design and build at any scale.

In 2002, after his retirement, Alexander moved to Arundel, England, where he continued to write, teach and build up to the time of his illness and death.

[citation needed] On 17 March 2022, Alexander died peacefully in his home in Binsted, near Arundel, United Kingdom, following a long illness.

[21] Alexander was elected to the Society of Fellows, Harvard University 1961–64; awarded the First Medal for Research by the American Institute of Architects, 1972;[22] elected member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Arts, 1980; winner of the Best Building in Japan award, 1985; winner of the ACSA (Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture) Distinguished Professor Award, 1986 and 1987;[23] invited to present the Louis Kahn Memorial Lecture, 1992; elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1996;[4] one of the two inaugural recipients of the Athena Medal, given by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), 2006;.

The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way.

And, as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form, as the trees and hills, and as our faces are.A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977), co-authored with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, described a practical architectural system in a form that a theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar.

The authors said that this occurs because they were built to local regulations that required specific features, but freed the architect to adapt them to particular situations.

[21] The book had its beginnings with an early version of Alexander's PhD dissertation based on fieldwork in the Bavra village in Gujarat, India.

It describes exact methods for constructing practical, safe, and attractive designs at every scale, from entire regions, through cities, neighborhoods, gardens, buildings, rooms, built-in furniture, and fixtures down to the level of doorknobs.

A notable value is that the architectural system consists only of classic patterns tested in the real world and reviewed by multiple architects for beauty and practicality.

[21] The book includes all needed surveying and structural calculations, and a novel simplified building system that copes with regional shortages of wood and steel, uses easily stored inexpensive materials, and produces long-lasting classic buildings with small amounts of materials, design and labor.

[30] An account of a design studio conducted with University of California Berkeley students on a site in San Francisco, it shows how convincing urban networks can be generated by requiring individual actors to respect only local rules, in relation to neighbours.

A vastly undervalued part of the Alexander canon, A New Theory is important in understanding the generative processes which give rise to the shanty towns latterly championed by Stewart Brand,[31] Robert Neuwirth,[32] and Charles III, the then Prince of Wales (2001).

[36] Alexander's final book published while he was alive, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems (2012), is the story of the largest project he and his colleagues had ever tackled, the construction of a new High School/College campus in Japan.

This quality is found in the most loved traditional and historic buildings and urban spaces, and is precisely what Alexander has tried to capture with his sophisticated mathematical design theories.

[40] He also initiated the process which led to the international Building Beauty post-graduate school for architecture, which launched in Sorrento, Italy for the 2017–18 academic year.

He continues: Even architects not immune to the charms of the places depicted, are loath to pursue the folksy aesthetic they see as implied and do not want to engage with such primitive construction—although the systemic collapse now unfolding may force that upon them.

The daunting challenge for architects then, if such a thing is even possible to realise, would be to recreate in a more contemporary idiom both the richness and quality of experience suggested by the pattern language.

For example, in the UK the developers Living Villages have been highly influenced by Alexander's work and used A Pattern Language as the basis for the design of The Wintles in Bishops Castle, Shropshire.

[54][55] Alexander discovered and conceived a recursive structure, so called wholeness, which is defined mathematically, exists in space and matter physically, and reflects in our minds and cognition psychologically.

In it, Alexander describes deep ties between the nature of matter, human perception of the universe, and the geometries people construct in buildings, cities, and artifacts.

[57] Despite his leanings toward Deism, and his naturalistic and anthropologic approach to religion, Alexander maintained that he was a practicing member of the Catholic Church, which he believed to have accumulated, within its knowledge, a great deal of human truth.