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The Timeless Way (series)

Series review:

Christopher Alexander's marvellous Timeless Way series lays out a philosophy of building design, a Pattern Language method to achieve the Timeless Way style, and show how these were used in planning at the University of Oregon.

The ideas, although originally expounded for (physical) architectural design, have recently been picked up by the Object Oriented computing community for OO Pattern Languages.

The philosophy itself is also deliciously socially subversive, since it would require radical changes in working patterns, transportation policy, and educational policy, at the very least, to work on the larger scale.

Series rating: 2
[ unmissable | great stuff | worth reading | mind candy | waste of time | unfinishable ]

[cover]

Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel. A Pattern Language: towns, buildings, construction. OUP. 1977

Rating: 2
[ unmissable | great stuff | worth reading | passes the time | waste of time | unfinishable ]

Volume 2, the core of the method, provides a language of 253 patterns, for describing buildings, and how they should be designed. The patterns range over ones for whole towns: 'mosaic of subcultures', 'four-storey limit', 'local transport areas' -- ones for small clusters of buildings: 'small public squares', 'common land', 'individually owned shops' -- ones for individual buildings: 'site repair', 'entrance transition', 'sheltering roof', 'light on two sides of every room' -- and ones for small parts of the construction: 'alcoves', 'ceiling height variety', 'thick walls'.

104. Site repair: Buildings must always be built on those parts of the land which are in the worst condition, not the best.

... each act of building gives us the chance to make one of the ugliest and least healthy parths of the environment more health -- as for those parts which are already healthy and beautiful -- they of course need no attention.

1999: We are having a house built to our own design. Remembering the lessons of A Pattern Language, I explicitly used the pattern 'light on two sides of every room', by designing in some extra windows -- I hope it works!