Just a couple of days ago, I was talking to a friend about how badly I'd love to get to show Christopher Alexander—who on paper was an architect, and in reality was impossibly more—the things that I've been doing with my life. How much I'd want to try and share the thing that my life revolves around with him, both because I'd have loved to get his take on it and because, maybe more importantly, a part of me would care about his take on my life's work more than I'd care about all but one or two other people's.

I don't remember why he came up, but that's because I haven't gone a day of my life in close to a decade without thinking about Alexander. As I write this, a whole two of my eight bookshelves in my living room are devoted to his books. Just yesterday, I nearly bought another of his, out of impulse. I bring him up every time I talk to somebody about poetry, or about love—both of which I still use his definitions of before I use anybody else's. He comes up whenever I find myself discussing Islam or Catholicism with somebody. And he comes up in basically any conversation I have with somebody about what a better world would look like, what a better society would be like, what it would mean for life to feel more generally alive.

It wasn't a surprise to learn that he died earlier this week, aged 85. Partly that's because Alexander always felt impossibly old, older than his years, whatever they were. I've read part of his Notes on the Synthesis of Form, his doctoral thesis, published when he was all of 28, and already he seemed like a man twice his age. A Pattern Language, his most famous work—it's been the best-selling book on architecture for 45 years straight, and influenced everything from software architecture to The Sims—feels almost timeless, apart from the fact that it's also unbelievably hippie-adjacent.

But that was Alexander's life's work: to discover something timeless, to articulate an ageless thing, at once vitally youthful and impossibly ancient. His writing style is perambulatory: he'll discuss how you design a bedroom for a teenager in one paragraph, and in the next paragraph touch upon the formation of nation-states, and in the one after that describe a particularly nice Shinto shrine he visited once. He never even seems aware that he's doing it: the impression that you get is that, to him, these things are all the same, and equally important. He'll talk about what duties the design of a shopping center owes to single mothers as if nothing in the world matters more than extending infinite empathy and compassion towards single mothers, because to his mind nothing else did matter as much. And then he'll talk about somewhat byzantine mathematical concepts, and it'll be clear that, to his mind, he's still talking about the same damn thing.

The one time he ever seemed genuinely angry was at the apathy of people with power. He shows a quiet fury towards architectural bigwigs who care more about "making statements" with their buildings than they care about helping people's lives. His astonishing pedigree—Cambridge, Harvard, MIT—never seemed to come up unless he was dealing with the so-called intellectual elites within his fields, slicing their pompous and overwrought theories to ribbons with unerring precision. He seemed to be interested in speaking to any audience he could find: one of my favorite essays of his appears in a conservative religious magazine I'd never have read if he wasn't in it, and he was as comfortable translating his ideas for spiritual audiences as he was translating them for a more academic crowd, or for people who didn't know the first thing about his field.

I've called his book The Nature of Order "my substitute for the Bible" ever since I first read it; the joke there is always that I am not even a little joking. That's not just because, towards the end of it, he talks a surprising amount about his (secular, non-religious) conception of God—it's because the stuff he's talking about, which amounts to understanding not only architecture but consciousness, community, and life as systems whose structures can be understood and engineered, is so profound that it underpins more-or-less everything. His system is half-mathematics and half-religion, both scientific and skeptical of scientific arrogance, spiritual but deeply allergic to evidence-less theories. What it really amounts to is him discussing strange and juxtaposed places—wild little gardens, bustling village corners, and, at one delightful point, the center of Manhattan side-by-side with hand-painted Harley-Davidson motorcycles—and asking: why do all of these things make us feel the same sort of joy? Why are we taught that these are all different from one another, when, grouped together as he groups them, it becomes clear that we respond in similar ways to these very different experiences? And why do some things fail to make us feel this way—and what drives people to actively create a world that feels so lifeless and unfriendly and hostile to whatever makes us human?

Since discovering him, I've found that every artist who I love, every philosopher who's worth a damn to me, every scientist whose work feels genuinely invigorating, every politician or activist who seems on the right track, appears to operate with what I can only describe as an Alexandrian worldview. Sometimes, it feels accidental; other times, I do a little digging, and find those people all citing Alexander by name. (He would have been the first to say that his work was just an attempt to definitively articulate a much older tradition, and to find pragmatic and evidence-based underpinnings for it in a way that might dispel the woo and let "serious" people take it seriously.) There are other people who I look up to as much as I look up to him, although not very many; there is nobody, however, whose work feels as fundamental to me as his. He defined the fabric of how I now can't help but see the world. The threads of everything else feel interwoven by his theories, and by his life's work.

I still refer people to "A City is Not a Tree," one of his earliest essays, as a cornerstone of how to think about the world. Alexander's argument, essentially, is that we think too much in terms of hierarchies and segmentation, rather than in terms of fields. His central theory is that things co-depend on one another, that they feed off of each other and reinforce each other. The elements of a composition, he said, whether that composition is a city block or a garden or a symphony or a poem, each inflect upon all the others, creating not only harmonies but conversations, circuits, scaffolding. The placement of a garbage can or a newspaper stand or a windowsill, all the things which we dismiss as too pragmatic to be aesthetic or important, instead becomes the most important thing, because each piece changes everything. And his practice seems to produce, not jaw-dropping buildings, but ones that feel impossibly peaceful, as if every corner and angle of every home or campus or walkway is a memory waiting to happen, a little pocket that encourages people to live their lives within it.

In the design document for a high school campus he worked on, which he reprinted in full in his final book in 2012, one element stood out as an astonishing thing for an architect to have presented for a bureaucratic school board to sign off on. Nestled in among the descriptions of cafeterias and concert halls was a quiet insistence that there be a "secret place" in the school, hidden in all directions, without a single walkway leading to it. A place that could only be accessed by crawling beneath some bushes. Students will be here for years, was Alexander's arguments. They need a place that only they will ever discover, and that they must discover. Because their discovery of it will affirm that this place is for them, and that is a place that acknowledges the secrets their lives will hold, and gives them a place that feels like it was designed for them and only them. Because, of course, it was.

Describing that project, he once noted that, while his request to include a pond was fought by a number of officials at every step of the way—Why a pond? they argued. What is its FUNCTION?—they received a phone call from the school's administration a week after breaking ground on it. A family of ducks had chosen to live there, the administrator said. This was no longer an idle pond. This was a duck pond. A little miracle born out of the happenstance of life—except that it wasn't a miracle, it was a byproduct of Alexander's entire design philosophy, which you could say amounted to: Think of the world you're making in terms of the ducks who will one day come to live in it alongside you.

At the climax of the first volume of The Nature of Order, Alexander describes a time spent at an astonishing, ancient monastery, in which, at one perfect moment, a butterfly landed on his finger. No possible space could ever be so perfectly engineered that the butterflies knew when to land on your finger, he writes. Except that, at that moment, he was convinced that that was exactly what had happened: that whoever made this place had made it with such care that even butterflies became a part of the architecture.

He spent his life trying to convince the world that this kind of world was possible. He leaves this world having brought it closer to that possibility, and having convinced more people that they could bring this world into being, all on their own, using nobody's expertise but their own, than seems remotely plausible. Unless, of course, he was right all along—and I cannot help but believe in his rightness, with a faith that would feel spiritual if it wasn't so rooted in simple, gentle activism. Every time I find myself in a beautiful, quiet place, full of a sudden conviction that this part of the world knows me and loves me and cares about me, I feel like I'm in one of Alexander's cathedrals. Devotion, to me, means only looking at the world like he taught me to look at it, and believing in a better world to come—not from up on high, but made with my own hands. A celebratory genesis, shared with everyone I'll ever love, in the world he taught us how to love, the world he helped us realize loved us too.