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A Pattern Language

by Christopher Alexander et al

1977 Oxford University Press

Amazon.com entry

This book, written in a collaborative way on the basis of a huge quantity of research both practical and academic, presents a coherent set of 253 related 'patterns' for the resolution of the important factors at work in a huge range of urban, architectural and constructional conditions, ranging in scale from a vision of a free world made up of self governing regions all the way to half inch trim.

Many architects who have heard of, but not studied, the book, are dismissive of the idea of a 'recipe book' for architecture. Of course, such a thing would be ludicrous; but A Pattern Language is emphatically not a recipe book, more like a dictionary of poetic structures, setting out the character of useful constructions and their relationships.

The book is deliberately titled 'A' Pattern language, not 'The' Pattern Language (the preface makes it absolutlely clear that the patterns presented are simply those which the authors propose as a working set to be used in the development of good towns and buildings - there is a star rating system to tell you how convinced they are of each particular pattern's fundamental nature). It must be said that this distinction has been known to be lost on even keen acolytes (little story about this).

I did hear that a Dutch group were attempting to use the patterns in the book as the basis of a computer program which would then automatically produce good designs - laughable in the face of the fact that Alexander's development of the pattern language approach was based in his rejection of computer analysis of design problems, having initially been among the foremost proponents (even possibly the grandfather) of computer design methodology, with his 1964 book Notes on the Synthesis of Form amazon.com entry. (It is amazing to discover that a search for Pattern Language on the WWW brings up many, many more links related to software design than to the design of buildings. Alexander's invention of the pattern language approach has been a powerful paradigm in the development of software design techniques).

Further undermining the criticism of the book as a recipe book, the presentation of each pattern is deliberately open ended and generative, rather then specific, set out in terms of the key parameters - the important word here being parameters. I have tried to write a pattern language for a cake, to illustrate the un-recipe like nature of patterns.

See this example of a pattern

Wikipedia entry on Pattern Languages

Pattern language and related links collection