I guess this would be worth pointing out: there is perhaps a difference of opinion between me and my views and the way my crews operate, and the sort of thing which is perhaps most typically thought to be true, here, in The Institute. And I just want to make it clear about that, because I think the general assumption here is that a lot of these kinds of questions are well-settled by traditional rules. You know that in whatever particular vernacular you are building, if you follow the traditional rules, you’re going to get these things about right. And in a sense that is sort of the core of what one might call the “classical approach” to architecture, to assume that those rules are reliable, and that you just need to kind of be guided by them, and then, from that point of view, the purpose of the Institute would be to make people more aware of those rules, and reintroduce them into modern society in some effective form. I’m a little mistrustful of that approach. I’m not sure that the rules governing these kind of things as they were in the 18th century, as they were in the 16th century, and so forth, are necessarily quite reliable in our time.

— Christopher Alexander, Lecture at the Institute of Architecture in London, 1995