there was an interesting dialogue between hdm editor and book reviewer wm saunders and the author c alexander :

here is alexander responding to saunders ar review of his books the nature of order and a pattern language.

Foreword

I have written the following article in reply to a Commentary, written by William Saunders, and published by Architectural Record in the May issue 2002. (1) The commentary took the form of a two-part book review, the first part dealing with a Pattern Language (a condensed version of a long review that appeared in the Harvard Design Magazine, Spring 2002) and the second part presented as if it were a review of The Phenomenon of Life, Book 1 of The Nature of Order. (2) However, the actual form of this second part was that of a personal attack. It was plainly intended to bring the book down not by argument, but by damage to my personal and professional reputation. The commentary gives little factual indication that Mr. Saunders has read The Phenomenon Of Life. Certainly he did not explain or summarize the arguments the book contains, nor did he offer any rebuttals to these arguments.

It is unusual for a book-reviewer to avoid talking about the contents of the book which he reviews. It suggests, to my mind, that the author either did his work very rapidly, and did not have time to examine the book carefully, or that he felt that The Phenomenon of Life contains material so damaging to the present way of thinking about architecture, that it had to be destroyed, rather than reasoned through, so as to prevent architects from reading the book at all.

If indeed that is the case, then this attempt to hide the faults of the present profession of architecture through bluster, is of interest, because it suggests how isolated the profession is from recent developments in the sciences. The book reviewed presents a proposal, ideas, and scientific evidence which, if taken together, could have enormous implications for the practice of architecture, and will, once taken seriously, inevitably change the nature of architecture in society.

additional material:

Some half a century later, Alexander's seminal contribution continues. He has recently published his latest four-volume magnum opus, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. The grand title, and equally grand and dense text, has fuelled a perception in some quarters that Alexander's career somewhere derailed from his earlier, rigorous scientific path, into a gauzy world of mysticism, solipsism or worse.1

Reviewing a galley of ''The Phenomenon of Life'' in the journal Architectural Record in May 2002, William S. Saunders, the editor of The Harvard Design Magazine and an admirer of Mr. Alexander's early work, called the book ''full of contradictions, foggy generalities and extreme and unsupported assertions.'' He compared Mr. Alexander to Casaubon, the deluded scholar in ''Middlemarch'' who devotes fruitless years to compiling a grand synthesis of all the world's myths.