A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

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Summary: A set of truths that will confirm may of your instincts
Review: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Constructions is a book for people who are sensitive to their environment. This does not mean the rainforest or garbage dumps, but the world around us: Our homes, the sun, our green spaces, our rooms, our "nests", our streets, our towns, and our cities. You will say "hey, I knew that!" many times as you discover truths and more truths among the interlinked patterns in this book. A guide that will help you plan your environment for healthier, more fulling day-to-day living. Discover the "patterns" you instinctively knew existed in your world! - Paul Kurucz

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Summary: Wonderful and succinct ideas for building design.
Review: The chapters on "zen view" and "sleeping to the east" remain with me long after reading the book

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Summary: Enormous value to home builders and designers
Review: We design and build houses and buildings professionally and are always interested in new ideas which contribute to a better final product. This book is for anyone who has an interest in achieving the highest level of good design in terms of placement, workability of all parts--inside and out--of their house. Its insights are on a par with what you would expect from the authors, and go so much further than a normal architect's communications with a client. The errors alone that this book will help avoid make it worth ten times the cost. Highly readable, very clearly organised, logical and to the point. For real estate developers as well as homebuilders, too, since it has a lengthy section of the elements of good city planning.An excellent philosophy of good design.

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Summary: Excellent.
Review: The sections on designing houses are wonderful and should be of interest to anyone planning a home of their own (although the construction methods suggested here are fairly impractical.) The town planning parts are thought-provoking but seem somewhat utopian

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Summary: Required reading for anyone who wants to build!
Review: This book is quite simply The Rules for architectural common sense - how to design useful and appealing spaces for people. (For example: "Don't make a balcony less than six feet deep, or it won't get used much". "People walking on the sidewalk feel threatened by cars whizzing past a few feet away". "If the roof appears to be supported only by spindly little posts it'll make people nervous")(I'm paraphrasing these). It's truly shocking to see how such simple and indubitable factors are ignored in modern design, in favor of cost-cutting and fashion. Please check out the hundreds of patterns given here, with photos, diagrams, examples, and most importantly, the "language" of how they coordinate together into a whole.

(Also take a look at Hildebrand's THE WRIGHT SPACE for another great look at "what makes a building feel good")

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Summary: Content good, navigation bad
Review: I will not add to the enthusiastic recommendations of others except to say I thoroughly endorse them. But readers who have not encountered the book should be aware of serious deficiencies in its structure that make it difficult to use.
In some respects, this book is like a thesaurus of ideas for arranging built space. As such, each pattern description also contains cross-references to subpatterns and related patterns.
Well and good. But it desperately needs an index. For example, there is a "stairs as seats" pattern and a "stairs as a stage" pattern. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to look up these index entries (dots inserted to ensure correct indenting):

seats
...stairs as
stages
...stairs as
stairs
...as seats
...as stages

This is a massive book similar in length to the one-volume edition of "The Lord of the Rings" which has been reprinted steadily without any updates since 1977. (The copy I saw was the 27th printing.) Surely in all that time, Oxford could have afforded for it to be revised and indexed. Since the patterns form a web of related ideas, somebody could come up with a beautiful foldout wall chart that shows all the interconnections between patterns, with colours indicating closely related pattern groups. And the nodes on this chart could give the page number in the book.


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Summary: brilliant series
Review: 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!!

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Summary: Modern Architecture Ends Here
Review: Not quite the research it pretends to be, more a polemic against Modernism in its final days, with many parallels to the themes of the 19th Century Arts and Crafts movement. Then it was industrialization's effect on workers and the demise of craftsmanship, now it's government housing's effect on residents and the charms of the rustic home. In keeping with its good ol' days message, the book design mimics a Robert Louis Stevenson first edition, suggesting it is at least as much style as substance.

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Summary: Living Space Defined in Elegant, Timeless Patterns
Review: Contemplate "Wings of Light." Yeah, "Wings of Light." Most houses are built like a box because most builders are ignorant fools as are the bureaucrats who prescribe building codes. In contrast, mathmetician and architect Mr. Alexander gives us a plan for inter-twining indoor and outdoor space in a near seamless harmony, including "Positive Outdoor Space" and "Wings of Light." No Fads here, the principles in this book are timeless principles that interact in truly inspiring ways.

We mere mortals are insprired by the principle of "Wings of Light" and hundreds of other inspiring, well-orderd Patterns that Mr. Alexander et al describe in short, concise, illustrative chapters that forever influence our understanding of living space.

You may not be able to change the world but you can change your own little world. "A Pattern Language" is your roadmap. In all of Architecture, there is no other book of rivaling importance. This is the Bible of Architecture, written and dedicated to the masses.

Myself, I am a voracious reader of non-fiction, as well as a life-long student of science. I can say, without hesitation, that this is the most important book I have ever read.

Consider for a moment your home, you living environment. Unless you are profoundly fortunate, you abode is rather dull and uninspiring. Your next home won't be if you put into action the lovely patterns in this monumental book.

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Summary: A new way to look at architecture
Review: I originally learned of this book in The New Cottage Home, a beautiful account of small homes that epitomize coziness, comfort, beauty, and in some cases, sustainability. At the end of The New Cottage Home, the author discussed some of the qualities that make a cottage a cottage, and in doing so presented some very interesting ideas. For example, people are subconsciously comforted by the thickened edges that often surround windows and doors. The authors of A Pattern Language believe that this is because we recognize this feature in one another...in the thickness of our lips, the boldness of the skin surrounding our eyes...and thus expect it in places like a home. With good reason, too. Lips and eyelids are no accident! Openings without thickened edges are prone to breakage and defectiveness.

Most of the "patterns" described in A Pattern Language are similar in that people expect them and are comforted by them. In fact, Alexander refers to them as archetypes, which is a word that always interested me. To think that there are universally appealing features in the built environment that people never even consider throughout the building process is staggering. Have you ever seen or entered a place that felt cold and unwelcoming? Read this book and you'll be able to understand why.

It's the universal appeal of these archetypal patterns, as well as the timeless principles on which this book is based, that make this a classic in the architectural field. While A Pattern Language has withstood the test of time, I still have to file a complaint for just that reason. Here and there you'll read statements that make you think "Huh? Things aren't like that anymore..." Nevertheless, Christopher Alexander was a man ahead of his time, and I can't say his ideas are any less interesting, sensible, or true since the year that he published this book. One of the most striking principles he touched on that still applies today is as follows:

"If we always build on that part of the land which is the most healthy, we can be virtually certain that a great deal of the land will always be less than healthy. If we want the land to be healthy all over--all of it--then we must do the opposite. We must treat every new act of building as an opportunity to mend some rent in the existing cloth; each act of building gives us a chance to make one of the ugliest and least healthy parts of the environment more healthy--as for those parts which are already healthy and beautiful--they of course need no attention. And in fact, we must discipline ourselves most strictly to leave them alone, so that our energy actually goes to the places which need it. This is the principle of site repair." (p.510)

Though a little outdated, and a little expensive, this is a book you can hold on to and refer to again and again.