The Timeless Way of Building A Book by Christopher Alexander www.patternlanguage.com Mind of no mindThe quality without a nameAn objective matterBitternessThe most precious thing we ever have+27 More Some emptiness in usDeliberate actsNo kindpatternsof.designA Pattern LanguageNon-architectsThe Side View #17: Susan Ingham & Chris AndrewsThe usages of life architecturemakingbuildingurbanismbeautyconstructionzen
A Pattern Language A Book by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa www.goodreads.com Its place in the web of nature9. Scattered Work21. Four-Story Limit51. Green Streets53. Main Gateways+27 More Deliberate actspatternsof.design125 Best Architecture BooksThe Timeless Way of BuildingThe design systems between usCollaborative Information Architecture at Scale architectureurbanismlifeconstruction
A City Is Not a Tree An Essay by Christopher Alexander www.patternlanguage.com Strands of lifeImpending destructionThe right overlapThe difficulty of designing complexityPolitical chains of influence+8 More Trees and graphsThe dishonest mask of pretended orderThe problem with treesBoth practical and aesthetic concerns citiesurbanismdesignarchitecturemath
Notes on the Synthesis of Form A Book by Christopher Alexander www.hup.harvard.edu I could do better than thatThis small internal quaverTheir wrongness is somehow more immediate mathdesignarchitectureformproblems
The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth A Book by Christopher Alexander www.goodreads.com Two generating systemsTwo types of building productionSystem ASystem BThis has harmed modern society greatly+24 More What the prototype tells youOn the "Building" of Software and WebsitesBack to the Drawing BoardReading the landscape architectureurbanismbeautyconstruction
The Nature of Order A Book by Christopher Alexander www.natureoforder.com Levels of ScaleStrong CentersBoundariesAlternating RepetitionPositive Space+10 More Strength from both mass and form architectureurbanismgoodnessbeauty
Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture A Dialogue by Christopher Alexander & Peter Eisenman www.katarxis3.com The realm of feelingPanicThe pitched roofThe trick of little machinesMerely a building+2 More
Trees and graphs Show image 0 Show image 1 A tree is a kind of graph, but a graph can be considerably more complex than a tree. I have reason to believe, which for brevity’s sake I will treat elsewhere, that the most complex class of processes and structures we humans can consciously prescribe, reduces mathematically to a tree. A tree has a top, bottom, left and right. Its branches fan out from the trunk and they don’t intersect with one another. They are discrete, contiguous, identifiable objects which persist across time. Trees are Things. Software and websites, however, reduce to arbitrarily more complex structures: they are graphs. A graph has no meaningful orientation whatsoever. No sequence, no obvious start or end—at least none that we can intuit. It is better considered not as one Thing, but as a federation of Things, like the brain or a fungus network, or perhaps a composite artifact left behind from an ongoing process, like an ant colony or human city. Dorian Taylor, On the "Building" of Software and Websites A City Is Not a Tree networksthinkingmath