A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)

Alexander, Christopher ; Silverstein, Murray ; Ishikawa, Sara

ISBN 10: 0195019199 / ISBN 13: 9780195019193

Editore: Oxford University Press, New York, 1977

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Classic work of architectural theory, second volume in the series. Listed in Hill's 'Buildings in Print: 100 influential and inspiring illustrated architecture books'. xliv, 1171 pages, illustrations. Burgundy cloth boards, unclipped dust jacket (now in a removable protective sleeve). Slight shelf wear to edges, small dent to front board, no inscriptions, spine faded. Photographs available on request. All books dispatched same or next working day in robust packaging.

Codice articolo 018300

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)
• Editore: Oxford University Press, New York
• Data di pubblicazione: 1977
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0195019199
• ISBN 13: 9780195019193
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Condizione: Very Good
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: Very Good
• Cataloghi dei venditori:
  • Counterculture
  • Art Theory
  • Architecture and Design

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

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.

Recensione

A Pattern Language by Chris Alexander changed the way I think about the way space is organised in a room, a house, a street and a town ... I keep giving it away to people who feel their homes don't quite work in the way they want them to. Every architect, estage agent and MP should read it. (James Runcie, Daily Mail)