Hide this

Results from Google Books

Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.

A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings,…
Loading...

A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction (1977)

by Christopher Alexander

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1,426134,806 (4.45)16

None.

Loading...

Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.

Showing 1-5 of 13 (next | show all)
One of the most useful books I have ever owned. Wish it were required reading for all architects and developers as well as home buyers and town planners ( )
  rosemarybrown | Nov 25, 2012 |
I have never read a book anything like A Pattern Language, and it is very unlikely I shall ever read its likes again.

It’s not often that one comes across a work so fresh, so singular, so perspective-shattering, so powerful in its ability to shape the very way one engages a significant facet of one’s world.

It’s a very simple book to summarize. Alexander and his co-authors prepared a list of 253 elements of human living, ranging from the broadest geographical layout of an entire country, down to the positions of doors, windows and potted plants in individual rooms in a family home, and including almost every aspect of cities, neighborhoods and buildings in between. For each of these patterns, they isolate characteristics they believe are common across cultures and times, and which make that pattern comfortable, usable, and beautiful. Photographs and line drawing are included frequently for illustration.

There is very little other explanatory material in this book, other than occasional brief introductory sections. So reading A Pattern Language is a bit strange; since the patterns seem independent, reading about them on by one seems initially like working through a reference book. But I found that before too long a narrative of line and form and light and shape emerged; I found myself anticipating, almost intuitively, what upcoming patterns would look like, and it became easier and easier to progress through the book.

As I approached the book’s end, I could see the overall pattern behind Alexander’s vision coalescing and clarifying, telling a profound story about living a beautiful life, at least in terms of how and where one’s body resides.

This book is a potent antidote to the poison soulless modernist architecture has injected into the very bones of the industrialized world. I realize it’s now an aging work – it’s over 30 years old – but I hope as more and more people become aware of the vague but increasingly toxic effects of ugly buildings and the dis-ease of living in them, Alexander’s time in the sun will come.

One final note: A Pattern Language may appear to the casual observer to be a book about architecture, and that's true. But the scale of Alexander's project is far, far broader. Within the descriptions of the patterns are embedded repeated and often remarkable insights into how people really live, think and feel. Occasionally there's a bit of a Utopian tinge that reminds you Alexander couldn't wholly escape the 70s zeitgeist in which he's writing, but on the whole there is more good sense about human nature between these two covers than you will find in whole programs of study in anthropology or sociology in most contemporary universities.

Highly, highly recommended. ( )
2 vote mrtall | May 22, 2012 |
Profound book - fantastic. ( )
  fsmichaels | May 16, 2011 |
I balk a little at the pretentiousness of the title. Why not just Patterns for Building? That is what the book is, a series of 253 patterns for building that in the view of the authors have proved their worth over the centuries. My doubt about the title aside, I join with countless other builders in admiring the book. I have read it and re-read A Pattern Language regularly for 20 years and it greatly informed the decisions I made in designing the house chronicled in my own book, Crafting the Considerate House. It is a profoundly humane work, rooted in anthropology, sociology, and progressive social thought as much as in a love for the sensory pleasures provided by well-wrought buildings. Illustrated with the simplest of pencil sketches and black and white photos, it is concerned not with producing art-trophy houses for the wealthy and privileged but with enriching everyday experiences for us all. ( )
2 vote DavidGerstel | Jul 6, 2010 |
This is an amazing book to help you in designing a house that you will be happy to live in, and will address many needs that you may not even know that you have. ( )
  rmcdow | Oct 25, 2009 |
Showing 1-5 of 13 (next | show all)
no reviews | add a review
You must log in to edit Common Knowledge data.
For more help see the Common Knowledge help page.
Series (with order)
Canonical title
Original title
Alternative titles
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Related movies
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Dedication
First words
Quotations
Last words
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Publisher series
Book description
Haiku summary

Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0195019199, Hardcover)

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.

(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 19 Apr 2011 15:39:45 -0400)

"At the core of the book 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 formal 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 a the problem with an illustration, sand a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patters are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today"--Jacket.… (more)

Quick Links

Swap Ebooks Audio
379 wanted

Popular covers

Rating

Average: (4.45)
0.5
1 1
1.5
2 4
2.5 2
3 24
3.5
4 59
4.5 12
5 142

Is this you?

Become a LibraryThing Author.

 

Help/FAQs | About | Privacy/Terms | Blog | Contact | LibraryThing.com | APIs | WikiThing | Common Knowledge | Legacy Libraries | 82,023,857 books!