The Timeless Way of Building: 1 (Center for Environmental Structure Series) Hardcover – Illustrated, 10 April 1980

Beautiful book

Christopher Alexander is one of the seminal thinkers in architecture, but his ideas are also relvant to software architecture, organisation design, customer experience and indeed science genrally. This is a highly challenging, brilliantly written, engaging explanation of his thinking. It stands with such classics as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenaence as a book that could change your thinking on the nature of quality and the social process of design. I would say the book brings together aspects of Taoism, Whiteheadian physics, Drucker's concern for the customer, and his original thinking. He also confirms Stewart's introduction of value into systems thinking as an objective feature of the system. Entrancing

This is a very powerful book, helps me get back in touch with my internal senses of how to create things, to appreciate beauty; also made me buy two new chairs so I could sit by the window and just look outside, so I will have a bit more to do in my tiny apartment than just stare at the computer screen. A book which has actual practical use for real life, love it so much!

If all architects thought like Christopher Alexander, cities would be wonderful places to live in....

Perfect

Perhaps it should have been called 'Zen and the Art of Building'.... I hadn't come across this book before, although I think it may be required reading for architecture students. Having come from a design background myself I found it interesting.It's long winded and often waxes lyrical, but the basic premise states that buildings are not for enhancing the egos of architects, but instead, they are for the people who use and live in them. So far, so good. Alexander also reveals how the patterns of activities carried out within a building are either helped or hindered by it's architecture, again, fairly predictable. He points out how certain buildings feel 'alive' while others are 'dead' spaces.The book goes on to explain how to achieve what Alexander calls 'the quality with no name' which brings a building, even a whole city, to life. It's a very organic process, achieved without the detailed plans normally involved in construction. I love the idea of building in this way, but I'm not surprised it's not widely practiced. How long will the project take? How do you budget? Maybe he covers all that in one of his other books!

I found in this book more than I expected. You can feel the author's passion for this subject: he is not talking just about architecture, he is explaining the way in which he sees the world. Writing about how to design the places where we live (from a small garden to something as complex as a town) he actually tackles system theory. For this reason his thinking has been widely applied in software design. However this book is profoundly different from many boring publications documenting software patterns. For Alexander patterns are not just recurring solutions to recurring problems, they are something deeper a more dynamic: a way to look at the world and learn lessons that we would have never been able to grasp just by logical deduction.

On starting this book it did seem a bit `alternative' and pseudomystical and you begin to think it was a lot of money to spend on a book. As you get used to the style and you absorb the message it becomes a very powerful force. The idea that people built before architects told them how to and that this knowledge has become lost is evident as you read. But this simple philosophy could apply to so many other areas of life where experts have taken away our knowledge. A must for any self builder or thinker - brilliant.

All as described

It's a book about architecture. It describes a new way of looking at design. Breaking down the design problem and attempting to provide a procedure to solve it systematically.It is a companion book to A Pattern Language and The Oregon Experiment.The book is so beautifully written that I sometimes am moved to tears by the profoudness of the thoughts expressed. All architects mist read this book.

Lo sto ancora leggendo, e già molte volte mi ha fatto scattare delle epifanie su tante cose, dalla musica alla organizzazione delle cose. Anche se il testo prende in esame il linguaggio architettonico, non si deve essere assolutamente degli architetti per comprenderne le idee. Io non lo sono.

I found this book so mesmerizing that I read it twice. During the first pass, I was surprised that the book was so philosophical and poetic in describing architecture. I expected something more technical. Later during the second pass, my goal was to find derivatives and analogies in software architecture. Based on what I found, I think every software architect would enjoy this book.The writing style that I noticed in my first read of the book made me feel like I was reading an architecture bible. I hesitate to describe the book as religious, but the book's description "the power to make buildings beautiful lies in each of us already" and the description of the word "alive" giving architecture "the quality without a name" triggered an epiphany when recalling that the Bible says "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." and, "So God created man in his own image." This is why I'd say this book has a primal, sacred aspect, and this is why we like to build. Additionally, the book especially moved me so my mind's eye was opened to see "alive" patterns and to think about the morphology of architecture filling voids and generating towns.On the second pass of reading, I was struck by this software architecture analogy in the table of contents: "16. Once we have understood how to discover individual patterns which are alive, we may then make a language for ourselves for any building task we face. The structure of the language is created by the network of connections among individual patterns: and the language lives, or not, as a totality, to the degree these patterns form a whole." Could this be the guidebook for designing enterprise software architecture?Obviously this book was the inspiration for the philosophy and vocabulary for software architecture, and I thought some of the following excerpts were noteworthy paradigm shifts."The patterns are not just patterns of relationships, but patterns of relationships among other smaller patterns, which themselves have still other patterns hooking them together---and we see finally, that the world is entirely made of all these interhooking, interlocking nonmaterial patterns." This sounds like the difference between patterns of software architecture and object-oriented software design patterns."Each pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution." Deja vu for software patterns."You may be afraid that the design won't work if you take just one pattern at a time...There is no reason to be timid...The order of the language will make sure that it is possible." Likewise in software architecture design, as one design pattern is considered at a time to see how it fits needs into the large picture of design. If this pattern is later deemed to be dead, it can be replaced by an "alive" design pattern."Next, several acts of building, each one done to repair and magnify the product of the previous acts, will slowly generate a larger and more complex whole than any single act can generate." This correlates to software refactoring."It is essential, therefore, that the builder build only from rough drawings: and that he carry out the detailed patterns from the drawings according to the processes given by the pattern language in his mind." When I read this, I thought about the metaphor to the software architect's vision and design. The software architect's design needs to be abstract enough to accommodate change easily, but yet simple enough so software programmers can understand it, finish the detailed component design and build the component to fit the architectural whole.

This has been on my husband's "must read" list for a long time. The book arrived quickly and was in great condition. I also ordered the "Oregon Experiement" and it came with a crushed corder as if it had been dropped quite hard. Both are great books.