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

Christopher Alexander; Sara Ishikawa; Murray Silverstein; Max Jacobson; Ingrid Fiksdahl-King; Shlomo Angel

ISBN 10: 0195019199 / ISBN 13: 9780195019193

Published by Oxford University Press, New York, 1977

About this Item

New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. First edition. 34th printing. Hardcover. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket spine very slightly sun-faded. Red cloth with gilt spine lettering. Octavo, 1170 pp, illustrated throughout with photographs and drawings. A clean, tight, unmarked copy. "A Pattern Language" sets out 253 interrelated design patterns archetypal solutions to recurring architectural and planning problems that together provide a framework for creating functional and humane built environments. Christopher Alexander (1936 2022), a renowned architect and design theorist, authored influential works on design methodology and environmental structure; this volume, written with colleagues Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, is the second book in the Center for Environmental Structure Series and remains his most widely read and cited work.

Seller Inventory # OXFORD-2026

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) (First Edition)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, New York
• Publication Date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195019199
• ISBN 13: 9780195019193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Architecture

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Christopher Alexander, winner of the first medal for research ever awarded by the American Institute of Architects, is an architect and builder who has built in many countries. He is also Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Center for Environmental Structure.