Right and left, before and behind, the fen lay shrouded. The snow that had fallen all day gave back a glimmering greyness to a sky like lead. - D.L. Sayers
2005, November 04
Patterns in Architecture
A language for towns, buildings and construction.
If you look around in the northern part of the East San Francisco Bay at the housing that was built by developers in the forties and fifties, as well as most of what is being built today, you would think that no one has ever given any thought to planning, livability, or simple attractiveness. This is not so.
A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, et al, was published in 1977 and is now in its 26th printing. It is the second of a series of three books; the first is A Timeless Way of Building, and the third is The Oregon Experiment
The book, A Pattern Language is carefully organized and addresses the architecture of rooms, offices, waiting rooms, small houses, large buildings, villages, towns, cities within the social context of how people live their lives.
Though it presents a theory of architecture and construction, the book reads like a series of meditations on human life, a social architecture. You can start at the beginning and read through, or start anywhere and read as much as you want.
These ideas are available to architects and developers. Why are they ignored?
Christopher Alexander's Website
Discussion of work by C. Alexander
