A Pattern Language: Towns. Buildings. Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)

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 observati