alt Hacker Newsworth checking this out from 1996 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA kind of ironic he was moving away from patterns to more fundamental concepts just as the software world was just discovering patterns. I think his shift to these more fundamental concepts is a much better way to think about design.
Alexander's thesis Notes on the Synthesis of Form contained the description of the design techniques, low coupling and high cohesion that were later brought into software in the mid-60s.
It's hard to get more fundamental than that, in software at least.
I remember trying to read his four book Magnum opus and found it much too dense. I think he settled on "life" as the quality without a name.