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.
