A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) by Christopher Alexander (PDF)

Description

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, “lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely.” The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain “languages,” which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. “Patterns,” the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Amazon.com Review The second of three books published by the Center for Environmental Structure to provide a “working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building, and planning,” A Pattern Language offers a practical language for building and planning based on natural considerations. The reader is given an overview of some 250 patterns that are the units of this language, each consisting of a design problem, discussion, illustration, and solution. By understanding recurrent design problems in our environment, readers can identify extant patterns in their own design projects and use these patterns to create a language of their own. Extraordinarily thorough, coherent, and accessible, this book has become a bible for homebuilders, contractors, and developers who care about creating healthy, high-level design. Review “A wise old owl of a book, one to curl up with in an inglenook on a rainy day. Alexander may be the closest thing home design has to a Zen master.”The New York Times”A classic. A must read. “T. Colbert, University of Houston”The design student’s bible for relativistic environmental design. “Melinda La Garce, Southern Illinois University”Brilliant, Here’s how to design or redesign any space you’re living or working infrom metropolis to room. Consider what you want to happen in the space, and then page through this book. Its radically conservative observations will spark, enhance, organize your best ideas, and a wondrous home, workplace, town will result.”San Francisco Chronicle”The most important book in architecture and planning for many decades, a landmark whose clarity and humanity give hope that our private and public spaces can yet be made gracefully habitable.”The Next Whole Earth Catalog. From the Back Cover You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. About the Author Christopher Alexander, winner of the first medal for research ever awarded by the American Institute of Architects, is an architect and builder who has built in many countries. He is also Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Center for Environmental Structure. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐i first learned about alexander through my study of software engineering. i’m an artist working on generative/evolutionary digital art, both visual and sonic, and i’m also in the process of studying to build a house. alexander’s books have been an inspiration to me in all of these fields. i won’t expound on the positives, as others have already done so, and my five stars give you an idea of how i feel about these books. there are quite a few negatives though:a) the price of these books is outrageous, why are they not available in a cheap paperback edition. if mr. alexander really wants to change the world he would do well to look at the open source software movement, specifically the ideal of open documentation. mr. alexander has a website on which he talks about freedom and idealism, etc… however, the book is not free, instead, it is very expensive, but more importantly, is not free to copy and redistribute. one gets the feeling that there is an element of the california guru in all of this. that he is peddling utopia to the hyper-comfortable. ok that sounds really harsh, but it makes me very angry that such a resource is not distributed freely, especially in the developing world. mr. alexander if you read this, please consider establishing an open on-line repository of your patterns, perhaps in wiki format, so that other patterns can be added, and so that your existing patterns can be amended through time and translated to other languages. i realize that most people in the developing world do not have access to the internet btw, but at least it would allow the people or organizations who do to print and distribute copies freely.b) there is quite a stark difference between the more rigorous and engineering oriented ‘notes on the synthesis of form’ and the later work. i think in the later work he correctly ditched the engineering jargon because he deemed it unnecessarily cumbersome, and also realized that it is not necessary to build a house. peasants with no engineering or mathematical background have been building beautiful buildings for ages, however in NOTSOF he spends considerable time espousing the idea of a generative grammar as a way of managing the immense complexity of most engineering/design tasks. for instance when he gets into the problem of manufacturing a tea kettle which solves both manufacturing and design constraints. i’d really like to see more patterns dealing directly with issues of energy management and ecological well being, which by definition would have to be more technical, but not by a great margin if explained in simple language. this way a house could be organically “grown”, but with energy efficiency there as a morphological force from the outset.c) in general the books could be shorter and less repetitive. there is a bit too much advocacy, and they often read like a some kind of new age self help manual, on the surface that is. these books can survive the new age surface feel precisely because they are so deep, but i think that less self-advocacy would significantly lighten them and would probably also manage to shave off most of the new age baggage.and finally, my advice to the software engineer, is to first read ‘a timeless way of building’, which will give you a strong idea about how patterns work. i also highly recommend ‘notes on the synthesis of form’ to anybody designing anything. i don’t think that ‘a pattern language’ is that necessary to read, unless you want to build houses, or are just a big fan of alexander’s (of which i am both).i based this review on ‘the timeless way of building’, ‘a pattern language’, ‘notes on the synthesis of form’, and ‘the production of houses’.i can’t wait to read ‘the nature of order’thanks mr. alexander!!

⭐This book is insightful and fun to read. It is also a book that is easy to pick up and read a bit, and put itdown and come back later to pick up where you left off, because it is broken into many very short chapters,each of which contain a key idea. It’s hard to describe this book, because it is so unique in its approachto telling the reader “how things ought to be” concerning everything from civil planning and city layout,to floor-plans, to architectural design, to furnishing. The author is very opinionated and does not shy awayfrom boldly telling you what is wrong with the physical constructs of our urban, suburban, and rural areas,and how all of that should be properly done in his imagined ideal world.In some ways, this book is like reading the professional diary of your crazy uncle who is constantly rantingabout what’s wrong with the world, and how he thinks it should be set right. However, after reading it fora while, you get the impression that the author is not really crazy, so much as he is a brilliant eccentricwhose experience and understanding is based on an extremely broad appreciation of how human beings chooseto craft their surroundings, and how we get it right, and how we get it wrong, and why.Be forewarned… you are not going to agree with everything the author says.I don’t agree, for example, with his outlandish claim that living in a home that is more than four storiesabout the ground will eventually make you crazy, because I have loved living on the top floor of myhigh-rise condo for the past ten years. I also don’t agree with his idea that all kitchen cabinets shouldbe open shelves with no doors, because the doors just get in the way, hide what is contained therein,and are essential useless. I must admit, however, that I love reading the author’s insights on thingswith which I disagree with him, and I have to admit that even on such issues… he’s got good points!Many times I find myself saying “Almost, thou persuadest me.”To be fair, I actually do agree with the author’s views regarding the vast majority of his observations,as they are all just good common-sense approaches, and I must admit they often leave me thinking”Yes, that’s such a beautifully simple truth… why don’t we always build it that way, or do it that way?”This book gives you the benefit of the sage wisdom of an author who is genuinely worth readingand considering. Even though this book is decades-old, most of its observations are timeless.It’s so hard to classify the book. Is it a Western approach to Feng Shui … without all the questionableEastern Spiritualism, and more of practical philosophy on how to best craft your environment?Or is it better described as foundational reading for everyone from a City Planner, to an Architect,to anyone building a house, to anyone one looking to make their home a more pleasant place?However you choose to classify it… this book is a unique, delightful treatise on how things shouldideally be in order for human beings to be more comfortable, productive, and happy in their surroundings.

⭐I’ve just bought the 10th copy of this book…….Someone gave it to me more than 10 yrs ago, recommending it as their favorite book – and I find that I read and re-read it all the time and I’m always recommending it and sending it to people. Whether youre interested in architecture or not this is a fascinating book, its written in very short chapters that cross reference and link up back and forwards across the book meaning that every time you pick it up you follow a different thread, sometimes into the realms of town planning and sometimes into hand building your own house and all points in-between.Christopher Alexander introduces us to a wide variety of the simple formulas that make a house into an excellent living space and demonstrates why some interior spaces are successful and why some fail. It’s both enlightening and practical, I highly recommend it.

⭐Bought this book on a recommendation from a friend as I am in the process of designing a self-build house. I’m so glad I read this. Despite the fact that it was written in the 70’s, it is still full of relevant, practical, thought provoking and wonderful advice and ideas for anyone involved in building design. All the advice is focused on making the spaces where we live better for us and not about making design statements. Loved the unusual structure of the book, the ratings for each of the “patterns” and the surprisingly poetic way it is written. What I really appreciated is great design advice about things I couldn’t find in any of the self-build magazines, for example, where to put your building on your plot to the best height for your window sills.

⭐If you’re studying architecture, I highly recommend either grabbing a copy of this or looking through it in the library. I found it useful for a studio project to use this as my starting point.

⭐Fast delivery, good quality, very happy.

⭐I really like this book! It’s a bit dated and not really the sort of thing to read cover to cover but its a wonderful tool when thinking about the relationship between people and the built environment. I must read if you are building or designing

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