A Pattern Language

Condition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9780195019193 Author(s): Christopher Alexander Format: Hardcover Language: English Year: 1978 Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc Pages: 1216 Series: Center for Environmental Structure Series Series Number: 2

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 inthe 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 bythe 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 andcommunicate 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