Unified Architectural Theory: Form, Language, Complexity

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 nature.


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, and using Salingaros’ A Theory of Architecture. 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.


“Unified Architectural Theory is not theory at all. It is evidence. It lets us see how until recently we have always designed and built. We’ve built buildings and spaces and towns that reflect the order in our genes, in the biological world we’re part of. We’ve felt at home in them because their order makes space for our body and our soul. Now we rediscover how to build a world that does not alienate us from who we are, a world that gives us joy, a world that brings us home.”

—Dr. Ir. Jaap Dawson,

Technical University Delft


“The information that I have learned in this one class has been more important than almost all the rest of my classes combined.”

—Jacob LeMieux,

University of Texas