A Pattern Language
Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)
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Narrated by:
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Mike Fraser
About this listen
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, a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.
After a 10-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 500 years as they are today.
Produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©1977 Christopher Alexander (P)2024 Echo Point Books & Media, LLCRelated to this topic
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With this updated edition of his earlier book, A Place of My Own, listeners can revisit the inspired, intelligent, and often hilarious story of Pollan’s realization of a room of his own—a small, wooden hut, his “shelter for daydreams” — built with his admittedly unhandy hands. Inspired by both Thoreau and Mr. Blandings, A Place of My Own not only works to convey the history and meaning of all human building, it also marks the connections between our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.
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Pollan is the master of hipster porn
- By Darwin8u on 02-28-15
By: Michael Pollan
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- By: Thomas S. Kuhn
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were - and still are. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that kind of book.
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The problem is not with the book
- By Marcus on 08-09-09
By: Thomas S. Kuhn
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Nourishing Traditions
- The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats
- By: Sally Fallon, Mary G. Enig
- Narrated by: Camille Mazant
- Length: 22 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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This well-researched, thought-provoking audio guide to traditional foods contains a startling message: Animal fats and cholesterol are not villains but vital factors in the diet, necessary for normal growth, proper function of the brain and nervous system, protection from disease and optimum energy levels. Sally Fallon dispels the myths of the current low-fat fad in this practical, entertaining guide to a can-do diet that is both nutritious and delicious.
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Wish I had read this book 20 years ago!
- By Athena on 11-10-20
By: Sally Fallon, and others
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Children of Ash and Elm
- A History of the Vikings
- By: Neil Price
- Narrated by: Samuel Roukin
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe. But for centuries, the Vikings have been seen through the eyes of others, distorted to suit the tastes of medieval clerics and Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian imperialists, Nazis, and more. None of these appropriations capture the real Vikings, or the richness and sophistication of their culture.
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Outstanding
- By Than on 10-06-20
By: Neil Price
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Dramatised)
- By: Robert M. Pirsig, Peter Flannery
- Narrated by: James Purefoy, full cast
- Length: 1 hr and 40 mins
- Original Recording
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One of the most important and influential books of the past half-century, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells the iconic story of a father and son's motorcycle trip across America in the 1960s.
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WARNING!!! Not the book.
- By Jeff on 04-21-18
By: Robert M. Pirsig, and others
What listeners say about A Pattern Language
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Leo
- 12-21-23
Makes me want to fix stuff
This has a lot of good ideas for improving human spaces, and most of it holds up all these years later. It makes you see your individual habitat as part of a larger entity. Slowing, smaller, carful.
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- abdelrahmanazmi
- 08-29-22
Life changing
Very objective theories every human should seriously think about. It is a book for everyone not just architects. the world would be a better place if some just followed its patterns.
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2 people found this helpful
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- chakra
- 05-14-22
Comprehensive overview of building for living.
Loved this book! Prophetic for its time, comprehensive, thought provoking, insightful. The sweeping scope of the effort is fantastic and relates beautifully to creating a life well lived.
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- Snh
- 12-26-22
Both practical and intellectual in perfect degree
This book helps bring ideas that would have to be hard learned to students of our environment. This book is a wonderful break water against the thoughtless construction we have engaged in for the past 70 years.
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1 person found this helpful