{"id":5127,"date":"2020-10-03T23:48:22","date_gmt":"2020-10-04T06:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5127"},"modified":"2020-10-03T23:48:44","modified_gmt":"2020-10-04T06:48:44","slug":"books-on-cities-christopher-alexander-a-pattern-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5127","title":{"rendered":"Books on Cities: Christopher Alexander, &#8220;A Pattern Language&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Christopher-Alexander-A-Pattern-Language.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5128\" width=\"441\" height=\"674\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Christopher-Alexander-A-Pattern-Language.jpg 882w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/Christopher-Alexander-A-Pattern-Language-768x1173.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 441px) 100vw, 441px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>When urban theorists speak of &#8220;reading&#8221; the city, they usually leave the mechanics of the act to the reader&#8217;s imagination. In 1977, Christopher Alexander launched himself high into the urbanist canon by taking the opposite approach, creating with his team at Berkeley&#8217;s Center for Environmental Structure a set of verbal tools to make legible, discuss, and evaluate the city, broadly defined, as rigorously as they could without losing sight of human values. The result was\u00a0<em>A Pattern Language<\/em>, a 1,171-page dissection of the entire built environment into its recurring components \u2014 or quasi-grammatical &#8220;patterns&#8221; \u2014 from &#8220;independent region,&#8221; &#8220;ring road,&#8221; and &#8220;promenade&#8221; down to &#8220;house cluster,&#8221; &#8220;sitting circle,&#8221; and &#8220;marriage bed.&#8221; The project is both descriptive and prescriptive: by the time Alexander declares that &#8220;bedrooms make no sense&#8221; on page 869, such a sweeping charge hardly comes as a surprise, nor does the analytical-romantic justification that follows.<\/p><p><em>A Pattern Language<\/em>\u00a0first appeared in the long post-hippie moment of the 1970s, which saw many a former seeker, high-profile and low, turn toward more practical concerns. The book&#8217;s synthesis of both the pre- and post-60s mindsets turned Alexander in particular,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/slate.com\/culture\/2009\/12\/the-enduring-influence-of-architect-christopher-alexander-author-of-a-pattern-language.html\">as architect-critic Witold Rybczynski puts it<\/a>, into &#8220;something of a guru in the youthful\u00a0<em>Whole Earth Catalog<\/em>-influenced counterculture.&#8221; Whatever value the era placed on the intersection of the visionary and the pragmatic, it wasn\u2019t a golden age for major cities, especially in places long subject to anti-urban impulses such as Britain and America. Alexander cites a Gallup poll indicating that a mere 13 percent of the U.S. population then wished to live in a city, as against 32 percent who voiced a preference for a small town. (A startling 23 percent of the respondents dreamt of a life on the farm.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Read the whole this <a href=\"https:\/\/colinmarshall.substack.com\/p\/christopher-alexander-a-pattern-language\">at Substack<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When urban theorists speak of &#8220;reading&#8221; the city, they usually leave the mechanics of the act to the reader&#8217;s imagination. In 1977, Christopher Alexander launched himself high into the urbanist canon by taking the opposite approach, creating with his team at Berkeley&#8217;s Center for Environmental Structure a set of verbal tools to make legible, discuss, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5127"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5130,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5127\/revisions\/5130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}