A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
SKU: 41978373671

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

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A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, ConstructionYou 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

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.


Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 08/25/1977
ISBN: 9780195019193
Pages: 1216
Weight: 2.13lbs
Size: 8.03h x 5.65w x 1.82d

Review Citations: Newsweek 03/24/2008 pg. 16
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SKU: 41978373671

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For the first two-plus months it worked fine -- the perfect grind and the perfect amount with a full barrel for my oversized coffee mug. I've been using it once daily, more or less, on a medium grind setting of 25, and this morning the ceramic burr started to eat itself. This is not acceptable. Follow up: Circle Joy contacted me and offered to give a full refund on this purchase, which was gratefully accepted. This is outstanding customer service.
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I am a coffee snob. I only get beans. I have been using a magic bullet blender to grind, which actually does extremely well, but the grind wasn't quite even enough. So I found the cheapest, ok quality grinder I could and bought this one. I absolutely love it. It take a while to grind, and it only does a little at once, but whatever. This thing works great and my grounds are now even. The burrs seem to be of decent quality and the whole device works smoothly.
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This wonderful tool may be the most used tool in our kitchen. The hardest thing about it is to remember you can push the button and it runs- you don't have to hold it!. The charge on the rechargable battery last a long time- about 1 recharge per month- and we use it daily. We use the mixer attachment most. It works great for protein powders, collagen, iced tea or lemonade mix. It cleans easily and is waterproof- just make sure the cover is over the charging port. We have used it to froth milk, whip eggs, and as I said we use it daily to mix beverages. I worried about the price, but it is a great value because we bought it in December 2024 and it is more powerful and has already lasted longer than two whimpy ones.
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