A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) | 
 enlarge | Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $65.00
Buy New: $36.51
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Rating:  76 reviews
Sales Rank: 5279
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 1216
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.8 x 2
ISBN: 0195019199
Dewey Decimal Number: 720.1
EAN: 9780195019193
ASIN: 0195019199
Publication Date: 1977
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New Book! Free Tracking Number emailed immediately upon shipment. Not a book club edition.
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Amazon.com
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.
Product Description
"Brilliant....Here's how to design or redesign any space you're living or working in--from 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. This classic handbook presents a language which ordinary people can use to express themselves in their own communities or homes, and to better communicate with each other.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 71 more reviews...
 surprisingly religious..... interesting, but not believable December 26, 2007
5 out of 11 found this review helpful
I bought this book after reading the glowing reviews on amazon. It was also an inspiration for Will Wright to make SimCity and the SIMS..... so I had high expectations.
I was shocked to find how opinionated and philosophical the book is. I expected the book to look at the history of cities, towns, etc. and describe patterns that already exist (much like the GoF's software design patterns book talks about patterns that people actually use). Instead the book presents a series of ideals about how the world should be structured.
If these ideals came from concerns I could identify with, I would take it more seriously. But instead they attack "problems" which I do not perceive to exist. For example, on p. 43 "The homogeneous and undifferentiated character of modern cities kills all variety of life styles and arrest the growth of individual character." This statement is contrary to my experience. I have met many great characters from cities, and seen profound cultural differentiation emerge from cities (e.g. jazz, abstract painting, hippie culture, punk, you name it). But the authors proceed as if cities killing character is axiomatic. I agree that there is a rural character that is not present in cities. But citydwellers have another type of character which is equally valid.
I have only made it through the first 100 pages. In these pages are so many naive ideas about mixing cityspace and vacant space. I live in Los Angeles so I know about sprawl & I also know a lot about cars -- while they are aiming for less sprawl then LA, they also neglect traffic congestion. They claim that making small roads in places make people reluctant to drive there.... the experience worldwide (worst in Malaysia, I hear) is that people use whatever roads are present, and if the roads are small, they then just end up sitting in traffic. The author's are naive in their structuring of space, nowhere do they cite any hard evidence of how these structures function.
I might make it the rest of the way through.... at least it's an easy read, with so many repetitions in how the models work you can kinda skim through it. I like the spirit of the book, it is reminiscent of P.M.'s bolo'bolo.... but where bolo'bolo comes from a purely emotional position, these authors take themselves seriously and believe what they are saying is objectively true. I give the book 3 stars because it is nice to see someone work through the ideas of bolo'bolo (which was actually written ~6yrs after alexander's book). I would give 5 stars to a book that did so by looking more at actual data of how spaces are utilized, and presented designs that didn't have obvious flaws in them.
Healing Our Industrial Age November 4, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Time has not eroded the significance of this book's contribution to the world of architecture. Though it reaches back to timeless solutions to architectural problems, it is also a way forward. As we devour our social capital in a half century of indiscriminate urban sprawl, this book offers alternatives that will help us revitalize our urban centers.
Wonderful! October 28, 2007
This book is the quintessential book on the subject of creating authentic living spaces.
This book provides a near mystical approach to architecture in a very simplistic form that anyone can understand.
Not just for architects - good for software engineers too October 23, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book talks specifically about what works and doesn't work when building cities and towns and how to take the human element into consideration when doing so. However, I found its conclusions and most of its patterns applicable to software engineering. There are good books on software design patterns such as "Head First Design Patterns", and there are some good books on user interface design such as "Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design", but this book really helped me merge the idea of software design patterns with the user perspective in a way that other books I have read have not.
If you are a software designer, read the book all the way through, make notes as you go, and see if it doesn't help you write better organized code that is more responsive and coherent to a user who walks up to your user interface completely uninitiated in your method of design. I know it helped me.
A Pattern Language October 21, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was an extremely helpful book in using to decide what house or town home to buy, why spaces might work, what needs to be added to them, etc. I am very glad I bought this book.
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