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

This book is aimed at non architects, written in short, practical entries that are easy to understand and hard to argue against. I used this book to build my house and it made the space more beautiful, practical and livable. I can't say enough good things about it. It is one of the most influential books on my life and has made an impact on me and my family who live in our house. It's inspiring and useful. There's not really anything else like it.

The ideas in this book will forever change how you look at city and building design. Urban planners, architects, builders and interior designers who want to keep their jobs-- read up! This book will help you create low-cost solutions to the real estate downturns in your area. You have unprecedented opportunities to rethink your cities, towns, strip malls, etc. to make them more user-friendly and inviting while trimming the ugly wasted space that fills so many of our urban centers and McMansion neighborhoods.More careful expansion of the cities along logical pathways, with rainwater harvesting, edible self-managed self-watered landscaping, and tree-shaded roads with neighborhood shops and small industry woven in would have created more jobs and more meaning plus kept people together in sustainable neighborhoods at a much lower cost, both initially and long-term. Now we face the prospect of bulldozing entire vacant blocks and turning them into the rural spaces that so many longed to be near to begin with. This is not good business sense-- it's pathology.'A Pattern Language' is the perfect medicine for this sickness. Like a healthy diet, it gets down to basics: how the human body relates to space; how people 'feel' in certain environments; the criteria of places that draw people in as opposed to others that are left usused or avoided. These principles are classic patterns that have stood the test of time, and Mr. Alexander gives numerous examples from around the world, from entire regions down to the height of windowsills and the best designs for office space.Anyone planning their own house needs this book! I designed a big house in Arizona for my large family using these principles and it's amazingly light and functional while being cool in summer and warm in winter. The kitchen is smaller than most custom homes, yet eight people can prepare food together comfortably while 3 more surf the internet and Dad reads his paper.

I am obsessed with this book. I’ve bought it as a gift for so many important people in my life; I carry it with my a slightly embarrassing amount; I use it and dive into it every time I’m thinking about any layout or rearrange or landscaping or lighting or literally anything to do with the human environment. It’s a life-changing, beautiful, humane, lovely tool, and every human should have it.

This is the best book I know of to introduce people to the ideas of what makes living spaces/architecture beautiful, comfortable and livable. Each pattern is starts and ends with bold text summaries that lets the reader cover this info packed book in very short order.

excellent theoretical & practical reference work

i first learned about alexander through my study of software engineering. i'm an artist working on generative/evolutionary digital art, both visual and sonic, and i'm also in the process of studying to build a house. alexander's books have been an inspiration to me in all of these fields. i won't expound on the positives, as others have already done so, and my five stars give you an idea of how i feel about these books. there are quite a few negatives though:a) the price of these books is outrageous, why are they not available in a cheap paperback edition. if mr. alexander really wants to change the world he would do well to look at the open source software movement, specifically the ideal of open documentation. mr. alexander has a website on which he talks about freedom and idealism, etc... however, the book is not free, instead, it is very expensive, but more importantly, is not free to copy and redistribute. one gets the feeling that there is an element of the california guru in all of this. that he is peddling utopia to the hyper-comfortable. ok that sounds really harsh, but it makes me very angry that such a resource is not distributed freely, especially in the developing world. mr. alexander if you read this, please consider establishing an open on-line repository of your patterns, perhaps in wiki format, so that other patterns can be added, and so that your existing patterns can be amended through time and translated to other languages. i realize that most people in the developing world do not have access to the internet btw, but at least it would allow the people or organizations who do to print and distribute copies freely.b) there is quite a stark difference between the more rigorous and engineering oriented 'notes on the synthesis of form' and the later work. i think in the later work he correctly ditched the engineering jargon because he deemed it unnecessarily cumbersome, and also realized that it is not necessary to build a house. peasants with no engineering or mathematical background have been building beautiful buildings for ages, however in NOTSOF he spends considerable time espousing the idea of a generative grammar as a way of managing the immense complexity of most engineering/design tasks. for instance when he gets into the problem of manufacturing a tea kettle which solves both manufacturing and design constraints. i'd really like to see more patterns dealing directly with issues of energy management and ecological well being, which by definition would have to be more technical, but not by a great margin if explained in simple language. this way a house could be organically "grown", but with energy efficiency there as a morphological force from the outset.c) in general the books could be shorter and less repetitive. there is a bit too much advocacy, and they often read like a some kind of new age self help manual, on the surface that is. these books can survive the new age surface feel precisely because they are so deep, but i think that less self-advocacy would significantly lighten them and would probably also manage to shave off most of the new age baggage.and finally, my advice to the software engineer, is to first read 'a timeless way of building', which will give you a strong idea about how patterns work. i also highly recommend 'notes on the synthesis of form' to anybody designing anything. i don't think that 'a pattern language' is that necessary to read, unless you want to build houses, or are just a big fan of alexander's (of which i am both).i based this review on 'the timeless way of building', 'a pattern language', 'notes on the synthesis of form', and 'the production of houses'.i can't wait to read 'the nature of order'thanks mr. alexander!!