Christopher Alexander's "Pattern Language"

A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction is a 1977 book on architecture. ... Twenty five years after its publication, it is still one of the best-selling books on architecture.

The book is a substantive, illustrated discussion of a pattern language derived from traditional architecture, with 253 unitary patterns such as Main Gateways given a treatment over several pages. It is written as a set of rules that are invoked by circumstances. This is a form that a theoretical mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar.

The work originated from an observation that many medieval cities are attractive and harmonious. The authors said that this occurs because they were built to local regulations that required specific features, but freed the architect to adapt them to particular situations.

The book provides rules and pictures, and leaves decisions to be taken from the precise environment of the project. It describes exact methods for constructing practical, safe, and attractive designs at every scale, from entire regions, through cities, neighborhoods, gardens, buildings, rooms, built-in furniture, and fixtures down to the level of doorknobs.

179: Alcoves

Conflict: No homogeneous room, of homogeneous height, can serve a group of people well. To give a group a chance to be together, as a group, a room must also give them the chance to be alone, in ones and twos in the same space.

Resolution: Make small places at the edge of any common room, usually no more that 6 feet wide and 3 to 6 feet deep and possibly much smaller. These alcoves should be large enough to contain a desk or a table.

251: Different Chairs

Conflict: People are different sizes; they sit in different ways. And yet there is a tendency in modern times to make all chairs alike.

Resolution: Never furnish any place with chairs that are identically the same. Choose a variety of different chairs, some big, some small, some softer than others, some with rockers, some very old, some with arms, some wicker, some wood, some cloth.

Resolution: Arcades- covered walkways at the edge of buildings, which are partly inside, partly outside- play a vital roles in the way that people interact with buildings.

Wherever paths run along the edge of buildings, build arcades, and use the arcades, above all, to connect up the buildings to one another, so that a person can walk from place to place under the cover of the arcades.

Conflict:

The courtyards built in modern buildings are very often dead. They are intended to be private open spaces for people to use- but they end up unused, full of gravel and abstract sculptures.

Resolution:
Place every courtyard in such a way that there is a view out of it to some larger open space; place it so that at least two or three doors open from the building into it and so that natural paths which connect these doors pass across the courtyard. And, at one edge, beside a door, make a roofed veranda or a porch, which is continuous with both the inside and the courtyard.

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

Resolution: On no account place buildings in the places which are most beautiful. In fact, do the opposite. Consider the site and its buildings as a single living eco-system. Leave those areas that are the most precious, beautiful, conformable, and healthy as they are, and build new structures in those parts of the site which are least pleasant now.

Conflict: People use open space if it is sunny, and do not use it if it isn't, in all but desert climates.

Resolution: Always place buildings to the north of the outdoor spaces that go with them, and keep the outdoor spaces to the south. Never leave a deep band of shade between the building and the sunny part of the outdoors.

Conflict: Outdoor spaces which are merely "left over" between buildings will, in general, not be used.

Resolution: Make all the outdoor spaces which surround and lie between your buildings positive. Give each one some degree of enclosure; surround each space with wings of buildings, trees, hedges, fences, arcades, and trellised walks, until it becomes an entity with a positive quality and does not spill out indefinitely around corners.

As elaborated in the book: many buildings are just big boxes, which makes the space around them unconnected and uninviting. Buildings with "crenellations" (concave areas) give people a nestled feeling outdoors.

I built my house with an enclosure on the sunny side and put in a brick patio. It's not completely successful - I think it needs some more planting to make it feel more cozy - but it's a good start.

Conflict: Placing the main entrance ( or main entrances) is perhaps the single most important step you take during the evolution of a building plan.

Resolution: Place the main entrance of the building at appoint where it can be seen immediately from the main avenues of approach and give it a bold, visible shape which stands out in front of the building.

Conflict: Buildings, especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street.

Resolution: Make a transition space between the street and from front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through this transition space, and mark it with a change of surface, a change of level, perhaps by gateways which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view.

Conflict: Outdoors, people always try to find a spot where they can have their back protected, looking out towards some larger opening, beyond the space immediately in front of them.

Resolution: Whatever space you are shaping- whether it is a garden, terrace, street, park, public outdoor room, or courtyard, make sure of two things. First, make at least one smaller space, which looks into it and forms a natural back for it. Second, place it, and its openings, so that it looks into at least one larger space.

When you have done this, every outdoor space will have a natural "back"; and every person who takes up the natural position, with his back to this "back," will be looking out toward some larger distant view.

Conflict: Few buildings will be structurally and socially intact unless the floors step down toward the ends of wings, and unless the roof, accordingly, forms a cascade.

Resolution: Visualise the whole building, or building complex, as a system of roofs.

Place the largest, highest, and widest roofs over those parts of the building which are most significant: when you come to lay the roofs out in detail, you will be able to make all lesser roofs cascade off these large roofs and form a stable self-buttressing system, which is congruent with the hierarchy of social spaces underneath the roofs.

Conflict: Wherever there is action in a place, the spots which are the most inviting, are those high enough to give people a vantage point, and low enough to put them in action.

Resolution: In any public place where people loiter, add a few steps at the edge where stairs come down or where there is a change of level. Make these raised areas immediately accessible from below, so that people may congregate and sit to watch the goings-on.

Conflict: A staircase is not just a way of getting from one floor to another. The stair is itself a space, a volume, a part of the building; and unless this space is made to live, it will be a dead spot, and work to disconnect the building and to tear its processes apart.

Resolution: Place the main stair in a key position, central and visible. treat the whole staircase as a room (or if it is outside, as a courtyard). Arrange it so that the stair and the room are one, with the stair coming down around one or two walls of the walls of the room. Flare out the bottom of the stair with open windows or balustrades and with wide steps so that the people coming down the stair become part of the action in the room while they are on the stair, and so that people below will naturally use the stair for seats.

Conflict: Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence which corresponds to their degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward.

Resolution: Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.

Conflict: If the right rooms are facing south, a house is bright and sunny and cheerful; if the wrong rooms are facing south, the house is dark and gloomy.

Resolution: Place the most important rooms along the south edge of the building, and spread the building out along the east-west axis.

Conflict: When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.

:Resolution: Locate each room so that it has outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction.

Conflict: On sloping land, erosion caused by run off can kill the soil. It also created uneven distribution of rainwater over the land, which naturally does less for plant life than it could if it were evenly distributed.

Resolution: On all land with slopes- in fields, in parks, in public gardens, even in the private gardens around a house- make a system of terraces and bunds which follow the contour lines. Make them by building low walls along the contour lines, and backfilling them with earth to form the terraces.

There is no reason why the building itself should fit into the terraces- it can comfortably cross terrace lines.

Conflict: A building in which the ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people comfortable.

Resolution:Vary the ceiling heights continuously throughout the building, especially between rooms which open into each other, so that the relative intimacy of different spaces can be felt. In particular, make ceilings high in rooms which are public or meant for large gatherings, lower in rooms for smaller gatherings, and very low in rooms or alcoves for one or two people.

Conflict: Rooms which are too closed prevent the natural flow of social occasions, and the natural process of transition from one social moment to another. And rooms which are too open will not support the differentiation of events which social life requires.

Resolution: Adjust the walls, openings, and windows in each indoor space until you reach the right balance between open, flowing space and closed cell-like space. Do not take it for granted that each space is a room; nor, on the other hand, that all spaces must flow into each other. The right balance will always lie between these two extremes: no one room entirely enclosed; and no space totally connected to another. use combinations of columns, half-open walls, porches, indoor windows, sliding doors, low sills, French doors, sitting walls, and so on, to hit the right balance.

Conflict: Finding the right position for a windows or a door is a subtle matter. but there are very few ways of building which take this into consideration.

Resolution: On no account use standard doors or windows. Make each window a different size, according to its place.

Conflict: One of a window's most important functions is to put you in touch with the outdoors. if the sill is too high, it cuts you off.

Resolution: When determining exact locations of windows also decide which windows should have low sills. On the first floor, make the sills of windows which you plan to sit by between 12 and 14 inches high. On the upper stories, make them higher, around 20 inches.

Do not fix the exact position or size of the door and window frames until the rough framing of the room has actually been built, and you can really stand inside the room and judge, by eye, exactly where you want to put them, and how big you want them. When you decide, mark, the openings with strings.

Conflict: Windows with a sharp edge where the frames meets the wall create harsh, blinding glare, and make the rooms they serve uncomfortable.

Resolution: Make the window frame a deep, splayed edge: about a foot wide and played at about 50 to 60 degrees to the place of the window, so that the gentle gradient of daylight gives a smooth transition between the light of the window and the dark of the inner wall.

I live on a cul de sac in Southern California. Built in 1989, the facades on our street are swallowed up by the great beige blankness of garage doors. When my children were very young, the neighbors and I would sit at the shadeless edges of our driveways wearily watching our toddlers play in the asphalt circle. A porch retreat would have been welcome.

On an adjacent street, built just a few years later, the porch is back, part of the New Urbanism, a movement to create denser, more social suburban neighborhoods. Garages have scooted discreetly to the sides of the houses, and modest verandas frame the front doors. Yet some of these porches are so small they are really just covered entry ways.

Some have been left completely unfurnished, not even pretending to fulfill a greater social function. Others had dreamed once of becoming container gardens, but have degraded instead into gardening sheds, complete with fertilizer bags, muddy trowels, and tangled hoses... Unlike the voluptuous verandas of older houses, most new porches are too skinny to seat a real gathering.

Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852) popularized the rural cottage, and with it the porch, as the signature of American vernacular housing. According to Downing, the porch invites, prepares, and shelters the visitor. A country house without a porch, he declared, is like a "book without a title page, leaving the stranger ... without the friendly preparation of a single word of introduction."

Downing treated the porch as an ornamental, organic form that could wind around and knit together the straight angles of the building, while also opening the inside to the outside, the cottage to its garden.

Architect and urban planner Christopher Alexander reinvented the pattern idea in his 1977 text, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. This thick little volume recalls the pattern books of yore; designed to travel easily between classrooms and construction sites, Alexander's book features dense pages of old-fashioned typography peppered with tiny black and white drawings.

... Patterns such as "old people everywhere," "accessible green," and "local sports" profess the value of mixed use, diverse populations, and neighborhood networks. While building a house means considering the surrounding locale, creating a kitchen mobilizes such patterns as "eating atmosphere," "pool of light," and "child caves."

... for Alexander a porch is not a thing added to a house as a pocket or collar might be attached to a dress. Instead, a successful porch brings together a cluster of social uses and habits. The porch is composed of such patterns as "private terrace on the street," "sunny place," "outdoor room," "raised flowers," and "different chairs. (People are different sizes; they sit in different ways.... Never furnish any place with chairs that are identically the same.)

A few deeply practical tips come out of Alexander's analysis, such as the dictum that if a porch is really an outdoor room, it should be at least six feet deep, to accommodate a small table and chairs.

The porch is also a conversation with the neighborhood-it's not strictly private, but communicates with passersby...