Rating  - Even the size of this volume is perfect!
This book is a wonderful collection of design elements for architecture. Each pattern dissects a basic architectural element ranging from a metropolitan plan down to the design of the flow through an individual home. Each pattern is placed in the context of a problem or activity, and shows how that particular solution is realized via some architectural device.
For example, the pattern for Levels of Intimacy describes the problem that each house must accommodate different levels of familiarity and intimacy. We need spaces in our home to allow guests to enter and yet not be admitted to our most personal spaces. The design of a home must therefore allow for different levels of intimacy begining with the least intimate/more formal at the home entryway, and becoming more casual and intimate as you proceeded into family living, eating, and sleeping spaces.
This book also influenced software designers to produce analagous collections of design patterns for the software design field.
Rating - Manifesto for a quiet revolution.
What many of this volume's readers miss is its great range. The book begins with the general -- patterns for reshaping our society, our cities and towns -- and moves all the way down to particular details of construction. Its followers in software engineering, as well as in architecture, would do well to recall the liberatory implications of the first patterns. This is not just a manual for building good houses, though it certainly is that. It is a philosophy of liberation, a manifesto for social change.
Rating - Empirical architecture and humane social design
The attention that this book has received from many quarters is well deserved. Although formally a work on architecture, it is really a handbook for anyone concerned with the development of healthy and humane social environments.
Alexander and his colleagues are successful because they take an empirical approach to architecture. Instead of beginning with abstract geometries, they go out into the world and study buildings and social spaces that do in fact work well. From these observations they generalize a set of "patterns" -- common structural and spatial elements -- that support living communities. These pattern elements range in scale from city-wide features to the placement of furniture in rooms.
I am an advocate of decentralized residential colleges within large universities as a way to improve the quality of campus life. I was pleased to find most of the specific structures that I have been trying to promote within universities included among Alexander's patterns, and to find many of them refined and improved upon. For example, the patterns "Zen View," "Activity Pockets," "Sleeping in Public," "Child Caves," "Pools of Light," and "Half-private Office" are all ones I have used in trying to establish strong educational communities. Indeed, the idea of a residential college itself corresponds to the pattern "Identifiable Neighborhood" with its limit of 400-500 people. And every university that built high-rise dormitories during the period of architectural insanity that was the 1960s should study and act upon, preferably with a wrecking ball, the implications of the pattern "Four-story Limit." ("There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy.")
Like many great books, A Pattern Language a bit idiosyncratic. But it is such a rich mine of ideas that you shouldn't let, for example, the occasionally illegible figures bother you needlessly. For a book this influential, however, and one that has already gone through more than twenty printings, the publisher (Oxford University Press) really ought to invest in the preparation of an index.
Buy this book and turn to it often, and compare the ideals that it presents with the real world that less enlightened people have built around you.
Rating - Think of it as a Utopian novel of sorts
I'm not an architect or city planner, nor do I plan to be one. I approached (and greatly enjoyed) this book as a sort of Utopian SF novel. Granted, it has no characters or plot, but in many novels of the genre those are the weakest points anyway, and "A Pattern Language" makes up for it with an unusual enough structure to give any Julio Cortazar or Samuel Delany fan goosebumps -- the whole thing is a hypertext, a heavily linked hierarchy of design patterns starting larger than cities and moving down into homes and rooms. It's not truly fractal (you don't find yourself reading Alexander's opinions on the proper arrangement of orbitals in carbon atoms!) but it forms a huge sustained zoom down into an Ideal World, a kaleidoscope of scenes of landscapes, cities, neighborhoods and houses that provoke a visceral sense of *rightness*. Later experimentation has shown that a lot of the stuff in here doesn't work directly as given, but Alexander and company are clearly groping in the right direction, one that respects the patterns developed slowly in "traditional" cultures without ever falling into a kneejerk rejection of modernity. I haven't heard of any actual SF novel set in a world informed by this pattern language, but it would be wonderful to read one.
Rating - The Best
I'm a "big developer" who believes in letting people alone to build what they think they want.
Nonetheless I intervene a bit- I buy every client, and every friend who is thinking about building, a copy of this book to raise their sights- to get them thinking about what it is they really want.
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