A Pattern Language
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| Author | Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein |
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| Subject | Architecture |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
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Publication date
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1977 |
| Pages | 1171 |
| ISBN | |
| LC Class | HT166.A6147 |
| Preceded by | The Timeless Way of Building |
| Followed by | The Oregon Experiment |
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction is a 1977 book on architecture, urban design, and community livability. It was authored by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, with writing credits also to Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. Decades after its publication, it is still one of the best-selling books on architecture.
The book creates a new language, what the authors call a pattern language derived from timeless entities called patterns. As they write on page xxxv of the introduction, "All 253 patterns together form a language." Patterns describe a problem and then offer a solution. In doing so the authors intend to give ordinary people, not only professionals, a way to work with their neighbors to improve a town or neighborhood, design a house for themselves or work with colleagues to design an office, workshop or public building such as a school.
Written in the 1970s at the University of California, Berkeley, A Pattern Language was influenced by the then-emerging language to describe computer programming and design. "A pattern language has the structure of a network," the authors write on page xviii. Thus, each pattern may have a statement that is referenced to another pattern by placing that pattern's number in brackets, for example: (12) means go to the Community of 7,000 pattern. In this way, it is structured as a hypertext, a form related to generative grammars.
It includes 253 patterns such as Community of 7000 (Pattern 12) given a treatment over several pages; page 71 states: "Individuals have no effective voice in any community of more than 5,000–10,000 persons." It is written as a set of problems and documented solutions.
According to Alexander & team, the work originated from an observation that
At the core […] is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea […] comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people.
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