Search results for ""center for environmental structure""
Center for Environmental Structure A Vision of a Living World: The Nature of Order, Book 3: An Essay of the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe
In Book Three of this four-volume work, Alexander presents hundreds of his own buildings and those of his contemporaries who have used methods consistent with the theory of living process.Containing nearly seven hundred pages of projects which have been built and planned in a number of countries over a thirty-year period, this book amply illustrates the impact of living process on the world. The book provides the reader with an intuitive feel for the kind of world which is needed to generate living structure in the world and its communities; its style and geometry and its ecological and natural character.The projects include public buildings, neighbourhoods, housing built by people for themselves, public urban space, rooms, gardens, ornament, colours, details of construction and construction innovation. These buildings, and the methods needed to design and build them, define living structure in a practical way that can be re-applied across a range of other projects.
£64.00
Center for Environmental Structure The Process of Creating Life: The Nature of Order, Book 2: An Essay of the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe
Christopher Alexander's masterwork, the result of 27 years of research, considers three vital perspectives: a scientific perspective; a perspective based on beauty and grace; a commonsense perspective based on our intuitions and everyday life.
£63.00
Oxford University Press Inc The Timeless Way of Building
The theory of architecture implicit in our world today, Christopher Alexander believes, is bankrupt. More and more people are aware that something is deeply wrong. Yet the power of present-day ideas is so great that many feel uncomfortable, even afraid, to say openly that they dislike what is happening, because they are afraid to seem foolish, afraid perhaps that they will be laughed at. Now, at last, there is a coherent theory which describes in modern terms an architecture as ancient as human society itself. The Timeless Way of Building is the introductory volume in the Center for Environmental Structure series, Christopher Alexander presents in it a new theory of architecture, building, and planning which has at its core that age-old process by which the people of a society have always pulled the order of their world from their own being. Alexander writes, "There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills, and as our faces are."
£50.40
Oxford University Press Inc A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.
£58.78
