A book of 253 “patterns”, each a recurring problem of the built environment and the core of its solution, arranged from the scale of regions and towns down to rooms, windows and details, and meant to be combined into a language that anyone could use to design.
Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley set out to recover the kind of shared knowledge that, they believed, had allowed traditional towns and houses to be good without architects. Each pattern has the same form: a name and number, a photograph, a statement of the problem, a discussion of the evidence, a solution stated as an instruction, and links to larger patterns it helps complete and smaller ones that complete it. Some patterns are marked as more certain than others.
The patterns range from the distribution of towns to the placing of a window seat. Examples include light on two sides of every room, positive outdoor space, a sheltering roof, a six-foot balcony, the entrance transition, and the window place. The book is meant to be read alongside its companion volume, The Timeless Way of Building (1979), which describes the “quality without a name” that the patterns are meant to produce. Its influence reached well beyond architecture, notably into software design.
The book, part by part
I Towns (patterns 1–94)
Regions, the distribution of towns, networks of paths, neighbourhoods and public places.
II Buildings (patterns 95–204)
The arrangement of buildings, outdoor space, rooms and their light: positive outdoor space, the sheltering roof, light on two sides of every room.
Rules: Light on two sides of every room · Positive outdoor space · The sheltering roof
III Construction (patterns 205–253)
Structure, materials and details, working from the structure of the space to the columns, walls and roofs that realise it.