Vale Christopher Alexander, Author of 'A Pattern Language', Has Passed Away
fleg writes:
From the Guardian...
The architect Christopher Alexander, who has died aged 85, saw buildings and cities as living frameworks for human beings. Through designing, building, teaching and writing, he sought "to provide a complete working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building and planning".
[...] A housing project in the barrios of Lima, the capital of Peru, in 1969 began with his team living for five weeks with different families on site, observing the details of daily life, to develop what he called a "pattern language" of 67 principles that formed the basis for the design.
[...] His approach provided the basis of an architecture bestseller, A Pattern Language (1977). Each of 253 "patterns", with its own number, describes a helpful relationship between parts of the environment, and consists of a title - such as Public Outdoor Room, South Facing Outdoors or Windows Overlooking Life - explanatory text, diagrams and photographs. The patterns are linked to each other in a network structure, which gave the book an appeal to the software developers among its general readership.
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