A City is not a Tree

A City is not a Tree is a 1965 article written by architect and designer Christopher Alexander, first published in Architectural Forum magazine and republished several times since.

The text offers a critique of urban planning, which tends to design cities as tree diagrams (in which each point is only connected to a single parent), while unplanned and successful cities follow the logic of semi-lattice structures (where each point relates to multiple other points).

I first came across the text in 2018 and since then I've been somewhat obsessed with observing our relationships and art within urban spaces. This project emerges from that experience and comes to life through gouache paintings, textures, and a lot of Photoshop.