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Home Reports A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

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"Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5,000-10,000 persons."


The book creates a new language, what the authors call a pattern language derived from timeless entities called patterns. As they write on page xxxv of the introduction "All 253 patterns together form a language." Patterns describe a problem and then offer a solution. In doing so the authors intend to give ordinary people, not only professionals, a way to work with their neighbors to improve a town or neighborhood, design a house for themselves or work with colleagues to design an office, workshop or public building such as a school. It includes 253 patterns such as 12 - Community of 7000 given a treatment over several pages where Pattern 12 on page 71 then goes on to state "Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5,000-10,000 persons." It is written as a set of problems and documented solutions. This is a form that a theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar. Written in the 1970's at University of California - Berkeley, it was influenced by the emerging language to describe computer programming and design. "A pattern language has the structure of a network" the authors write on page xviii. Thus each pattern may have a statement that is referenced to another pattern by placing that pattern's number in brackets, for example:(12) means go to the Community of 7,000 pattern. If the book had been written a few decades later, it probably would have been a web site, with each page being a pattern having hyperlinks to other patterns.


—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, front bookflap


"...each pattern represents our current best guess as to what arrangement of the physical environment will work to solve the problem presented. The empirical questions center on the problem -does it occur and is it felt in the way we have described it? -and the solution- does the arrangement we propose in fact resolve the problem? And the asterisks represent our degree of faith in these hypotheses. But of course, no matter what the asterisks say, the patterns are still hypotheses, all 253 of them -and are therefore all tentative, all free to evolve under the impact of new experience and observation"
—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, p. xv


—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, p. 958


—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, p. 437,439

When these patterns are taken together, the authors say, they begin to form a kind of language, each pattern forming a word/though of a true language rather than being a prescriptive way to design or solve a problem. As the authors write on p xiii, "Each solution is stated in such a way that it gives the essential field of relationships needed to solve the problem, but in a very general and abstract way - so that you can solve the problem for yourself, in your own way, by adapting it to your preferences, and the local conditions at the place where you are making it."



—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, p. 742



The four books in the series are:



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