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Author: Howard Davis Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000625060 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 365
Book Description
This book brings together key works of the noted architect and architectural theorist Christopher Alexander (1936–2022), many of which have not been published before. The book contains twenty-five essays and other works, many chosen from the newly organized Christopher Alexander archive, providing a window into the ideas and thought process of one of the most innovative architectural thinkers of the twentieth century. The items span Alexander’s fifty-year career, beginning with an early version of his PhD dissertation based on fieldwork in India, continuing to fifteen years in the development of A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling books in the history of architecture, and proceeding to the writing of The Nature of Order, Alexander’s four-volume masterwork, and beyond. The writings combine theory and descriptions of practice, and together support a blueprint for the development of a new, humane way of building, while also providing a window into the mind of an extraordinary thinker, teacher and professional.
Author: Howard Davis Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000625060 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 365
Book Description
This book brings together key works of the noted architect and architectural theorist Christopher Alexander (1936–2022), many of which have not been published before. The book contains twenty-five essays and other works, many chosen from the newly organized Christopher Alexander archive, providing a window into the ideas and thought process of one of the most innovative architectural thinkers of the twentieth century. The items span Alexander’s fifty-year career, beginning with an early version of his PhD dissertation based on fieldwork in India, continuing to fifteen years in the development of A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling books in the history of architecture, and proceeding to the writing of The Nature of Order, Alexander’s four-volume masterwork, and beyond. The writings combine theory and descriptions of practice, and together support a blueprint for the development of a new, humane way of building, while also providing a window into the mind of an extraordinary thinker, teacher and professional.
Author: Christopher Alexander Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 9781003187516 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
"This book brings together key works of the noted architect and architectural theorist Christopher Alexander, many of which have not been published before. The book contains twenty-five essays and other works, many chosen from the newly organized Christopher Alexander archive, providing a window into the ideas and thought process of one of the most innovative architectural thinkers of the twentieth century. The items span Alexander's fifty-year career, beginning with an early version of his PhD dissertation based on fieldwork in India, continuing to fifteen years in the development of A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling books in the history of architecture, and proceeding to the writing of The Nature of Order, Alexander's four-volume masterwork, and beyond. The writings combine theory and descriptions of practice, and together support a blueprint for the development of a new, humane way of building, while also providing a window into the mind of an extraordinary thinker, teacher and professional"--
Author: Christopher Alexander Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674627512 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
"These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function." This book, opening with these words, presents an entirely new theory of the process of design. In the first part of the book, Christopher Alexander discusses the process by which a form is adapted to the context of human needs and demands that has called it into being. He shows that such an adaptive process will be successful only if it proceeds piecemeal instead of all at once. It is for this reason that forms from traditional un-self-conscious cultures, molded not by designers but by the slow pattern of changes within tradition, are so beautifully organized and adapted. When the designer, in our own self-conscious culture, is called on to create a form that is adapted to its context he is unsuccessful, because the preconceived categories out of which he builds his picture of the problem do not correspond to the inherent components of the problem, and therefore lead only to the arbitrariness, willfulness, and lack of understanding which plague the design of modern buildings and modern cities. In the second part, Mr. Alexander presents a method by which the designer may bring his full creative imagination into play, and yet avoid the traps of irrelevant preconception. He shows that, whenever a problem is stated, it is possible to ignore existing concepts and to create new concepts, out of the structure of the problem itself, which do correspond correctly to what he calls the subsystems of the adaptive process. By treating each of these subsystems as a separate subproblem, the designer can translate the new concepts into form. The form, because of the process, will be well-adapted to its context, non-arbitrary, and correct. The mathematics underlying this method, based mainly on set theory, is fully developed in a long appendix. Another appendix demonstrates the application of the method to the design of an Indian village.
Author: Christopher Alexander Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190050357 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 1216
Book Description
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.
Author: Christopher Alexander Publisher: Nature of Order ISBN: 0972652914 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 492
Book Description
In Book Oneof this four-volume work, Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years. This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.
Author: Christopher Alexander Publisher: ISBN: Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 526
Book Description
Christoper Alexander's always controversial work raises issues critical to regenerating the environment and creating a new culture for building--and rebuilding--our cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and gardens. Demonstrates the application of Alexander's theories and methods to a large-scale project and shows how architecture can bring life to a community. The creative processes described in the book are for anyone who designs, builds, shapes, repairs, or otherwise modifies the built environment.
Author: Hank Dittmar Publisher: Island Press ISBN: 1642830364 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
"Hank lived by the credo 'first listen, then design.'" —Scott Bernstein, Founder and Chief Strategy + Innovation Officer, Center for Neighborhood Technology Hank Dittmar was a globally recognized urban planner, advocate, and policy advisor. He wrote extensively on a wide range of topics, including architectural criticism, community planning, and transportation policy over his long and storied career. In My Kind of City, Dittmar has organized his selected writings into ten sections with original introductions. His observations range on scale from local ("My Favorite Street: Seven Dials, Covent Garden, London") to national ("Post Truth Architecture in the Age of Trump") and global ("Architects are Critical to Adapting our Cities to Climate Change"). Andrés Duany writes of Hank in the book foreword, "He has continued to search for ways to engage place, community and history in order to avoid the tempting formalism of plans." The range of topics covered in My Kind of City reflects the breadth of Dittmar's experience in working for better cities for people. Common themes emerge in the engaging prose including Dittmar's belief that improving our cities should not be left to the "experts"; his appreciation for the beautiful and the messy; and his rare combination of deep expertise and modesty. As Lynn Richards, CEO of Congress for the New Urbanism expresses in the preface, "Hank's writing is smart without being elitist, witty and poetic, succinct and often surprising." My Kind of City captures a visionary planner's spirit, eye for beauty, and love for the places where we live.
Author: Gareth Dale Publisher: Polity ISBN: 0745640710 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.
Author: Stefan Müller-Doohm Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0745694640 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 828
Book Description
'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. ‘It can only be defined in a living context together with others.’ In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole. Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.
Author: Howard Davis
Author: Howard Davis
Author: Christopher Alexander
Author: Christopher Alexander
Author: Christopher Alexander
Author: Christopher Alexander
Author: Christopher Alexander
Author: Nikos Angelos Salingaros
Author: Hank Dittmar
Author: Gareth Dale
Author: Stefan Müller-Doohm