A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)
EUR 37,08
The Best - I m a big developer who believes in letting people alone to build what they think they want.Nonetheless I intervene a bit- I buy every client, and every friend who is thinking about building, a copy of this book to raise their sights- to get them thinking about what it is they really want.
wealth of positive design concepts - Do take the time to peruse all reader reviews. This is a valuable book. It is a bit enormous, though, and there is no index. This means that if the reader has to hunt for some little reference or fact, he or she is in for a long trek through these pages. Although it is designed with many short chapters, each devoted to a design element, the sheer amount of data is somewhat daunting. Alexander does write clearly, and in an informal, second or first-person manner. But there is little summarizing. Probably an excellent book to read cover-to-cover as part of a large study project. So read this book and know it well BEFORE you talk to your architect, contractor, designer... don t do as I did and start speed reading it when the architect hands over the blue prints.Note: Whereas feng shui is a little more mystical, Alexander s suggested design tactics make practical sense. (I gently encourage any reader trying to choose between feng shui and this book to go with the latter). Very useful concepts for anyone who wants to make the most of their living space.
This book changed the way I look at buildings ... and life! - My fascination with Christopher Alexander s work began with The Timeless Way of Building, but increased tenfold upon discovering his inexhaustible classic, A Pattern Language. At over a thousand pages (I think,) A Pattern Language is an encyclopedic study of what makes buildings, streets, and communities work -- indeed, what makes environments human.Alexander and his co-authors present us with over two hundred (roughly 250) patterns that they believe must be present in order for an environment to be pleasing, comfortable, or in their words, alive. The patterns start at the most general level -- the first pattern, Independent Regions, describes the ideal political entity, while another of my favorite patterns, Mosaic of Subcultures, described the proper distribution of different groups within a city. The patterns gradually become more specific -- you ll read arguments about how universities should relate to the community, the proper placement of parks, the role of cafes in a city s life. If you wonder about the best design for a home, the authors will describe everything from how roofs and walls should be built, down to how light should fall within the home, where your windows should be placed, and even the most pleasant variety of chairs in the home. An underlying theme of all the patterns is that architecture, at its best, can be used to foster meaningful human interaction, and the authors urge us to be aware of how the houses we build can help us balance needs for intimacy and privacy.They admit that they are uncertain about some of the patterns -- they indicate their degree of certainty using a code of asterisks placed before the pattern. For each pattern, the authors summarize the pattern in a brief statement printed in boldface, and then describe it at length, drawing upon a variety of sources to give us a full sense of what they mean: these supporting sources include an excerpt from a Samuel Beckett novel, papers in scholarly journals, newspaper clippings, etc. Most patterns are accompanied by a photograph (many of them beautiful and fascinating in their own right) and all are illustrated by small, casual hand-drawings. Taken together, A Pattern Language is an extraordinarily rich text, visually and conceptually.As I said in the header of this review, A Pattern Language has changed the way I look at buildings and neighborhoods -- I feel like this book has made me attuned to what works, and what doesn t work, in the human environment. I m constantly realizing things about buildings and streets that this book helped me see -- things that make people feel at home, or feel alive, in their surroundings, or conversely, things that make people uncomfortable. And the book makes me think differently about life because it showed me how our well-being depends so much upon the way our buildings fit, or don t fit, us as UNIQUE INDIVIDUALS.
Not Architecture ... Computer Science! - :) I can t believe noone has mentioned that this book was the inspiration for the latest fashion in computer science: Patterns The idea is to look at what kind of solutions work, and then when you have a problem to solve, you think what kind of pattern this is like. Then you have the benefit of collective wisdom as you go about crafting your solution.At any rate, this book is more than Architecture.
This IS a book about architecture...! - In California, mall developers finally used a different floor plan. They built an outside mall with a porch-like cafe, looking out over a meandering shopping area below. A reporter interviewed a dozen people, all of whom said they found themselves spending all day at the mall. Why, he asked,is it the shops? The stuff? And why this mall? We just like hanging out especially over there on the porch, they said - pointing to the porch-like cafe, where there were no shops. Yeah, hippie-type architecture, like the Romans built a couple thousand years ago! A touchy-feely book about architecture, about spaces that people gravitate to. Alexander points out that there are places that humans naturally gravitate towards, and designs based on these places are repeated in many cultures and many eras. When we try to ignore our feelings and live in an economical box shell, we start to wonder why all our knickknacks don t make us feel at home. When they try to make an antiseptic mall- or city- that way, developers wonder why no one hangs out there.Read this before you move into a mistake that no feng shwee mirror can fix!