Some notes taken from Alexander’s: Timeless Way of Building
The Quality
Each of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe.9
And there is a way that a building or a town can actually be brought to life like this.10
This one way of building has always existed.10
But it has become possible to identify it, only now, by going to a level of analysis which is deep enough to show what is invariant in all the different versions of this way.11
[Being Alive] happens when our inner forces are resolved. […] Of course, in practice we often don’t know just what our inner forces are.51
In order to define this quality in buildings and in towns, we must begin by understanding that every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there.55
All the life and soul of a place, all of our experiences there, depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the patterns of events which we experience there.62
This does not mean that space creates events, or that it causes them.72
It simply means that a pattern of events cannot be separated from the space where it occurs.73
We know […] roughly what the structure of a town or a building is. […] On the geometrical level, we see certain physical elements repeating endlessly, combined in almost endless variety of combinations.82
And each of this patterns has a specific pattern of events associated with it.83
Each of those patterns is a morphological law, which establishes a set of relationship in space. This morphological law can be expressed in the same general form: X-->r(A,B,…), which means: Within a context of type X, the parts A, B, … are related by the relationship r. […] And each law or pattern is itself a pattern of relationships among still other laws, which are themselves just patterns of relationships again.90
Each pattern in the space has a pattern of events associated with it.91
We realize then that it is just the patterns of events in space which are repeating in the building or the town: and nothing else.94
Each building gets its character from just the patterns which keep on repeating there.95
The number of the patterns out of which a building or a town is made is rather small.98
A man is alive when he is […] true to his inner forces, and able to act freely according to the nature of the situation he is in.105
A pattern which prevents us from resolving our inner conflicting forces, leaves us almost perpetually in a state of tension.112
[…] saying these patterns are alive is more or less the same as saying they are stable.118
In short, a pattern lives, when it allows its own internal forces to resolve themselves.120
The more living patterns there are in a thing, […] the more it comes to life as an entirety.123
There is always repetition of the patterns.146
But there is always variation and uniqueness in the way the patterns manifest themselves.147
The Gate
The people can shape buildings for themselves, and have done it for centuries, by using languages which I call pattern languages. A pattern language gives each person who uses it, the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences.167
Every barn is made of patterns.178
These patterns are expressed as rules of thumb, which any farmer can combine and re-combine to make an infinite variety of unique barns.179
Each pattern is a rule which describes what you have to do to generate the entity which it defines.182
It is in this sense that the system of patterns forms a language.183
From a mathematical point of view, the simplest kind of a language is a system which contains of two sets: (1) A set of elements or symbols. (2) A set of rules for combining thee symbols.183
A natural language like English is a more complex system.184
A pattern language is still a more complex system of this kind.185
The patterns are both elements and rules, so rules and elements are indistinguishable.185
Natural Language
Pattern Language
Words
Patterns
Rules of grammar and meaning which give connection
Patterns which specify connections between patterns
Sentences
Buildings and Places table from p. 187
The patterns from our time, like all other patterns in the built environment, come from the pattern languages which people use.198
They come from the work of thousands of different people. […] Each of them builds by following some rules of thumb.200
And all these rules of thumb – or patterns – are part of larger systems which are languages.202
And you yourself make your designs by using a pattern language.204
At the moment when a person is faced with an act of design, he does not have time to think about it from scratch.204
It is only because a person has a pattern language in his mind, that he can be creative when he builds. […] The rules of English make you creative because they save you from having to bother with meaningless combinations of words.206
A pattern language does the same.207
The patterns, which repeat themselves, come simply from the fact that all the people have a common language, and that each one of them uses this common language when he makes a thing.209
And the enormous repetition of patterns, which makes up the world, comes about because the languages which people use to make the world are widely shared.210
For all the ugliest and most deadening places in the world are made from patterns as well.228
It is therefore obvious that the mere use of pattern languages alone does not ensure that people can make places live.229
In a town with a living language, the pattern language is so widely shared that everyone can use it.229
The connection between the users and the act of building is direct. Either the people build for themselves, or else they talk directly to the craftsmen who build for them, with almost the same degree of control over the small details which are built.231
The adoption between people and buildings is profound.231
Most people believe themselves incompetent to design anything and believe that it can only be done properly by architects and planners.232
Adaptation of buildings to people becomes impossible.239
It must be obvious that a town cannot become alive without a living language in it.240
So long as the people of society are separated from the language which is being used to shape their buildings, the buildings cannot be alive.241
To work our way toward a shared and living language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life.243
Each pattern is a tree-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution.247
There are always three essential things we must identify: What, exactly, is this something? Why, exactly, is this something helping to make the place alive? And when, or where, exactly, will this pattern work?249
First define some physical feature of the place, which is seems worth abstracting.249
Next, we must define the problem, or the field of forces which this pattern brings into balance.251
Finally, we must define the range of contexts where this system of forces exists and where this pattern of physical relationships will indeed actually bring it into balance.252
Every pattern we define must be formulated in the form of a rule which establishes a relationship between a context, a system of forces which arises in that context, and a configuration which allows these forces to resolve themselves in that context. It has the following generic form: Context --> System of Forces --> Configuration.253
In order to discover patterns, which are alive, we must always start with observation.254
Try to discover some property which is common to all the ones which feel good, and missing from all the ones which don’t feel good.255
Try to identify the problem which exists in […] [instances] which lack this property.256
Knowledge of the problem then helps shed light on the invariant which solves the problem.257
We find our way to this invariant by starting with a set of positive [or negative] examples.258
You must be able to draw it. If you can’t draw a diagram of it, it isn’t a pattern.267
You must give it a name. So long as a pattern has a weak name, it means that it is not a clear concept, and you cannot clearly tell me to make "one."267
A pattern only works, fully, when it deals with all the forces that are actually present in the situation. The difficulty is that we have no reliable way of knowing just exactly what the forces in a situation are. 285
To do this, we must rely on feelings more than intellect.286
We can always ask ourselves just how a pattern makes us feel. And we can always ask the same of someone else.290
The success of this test hinges on […] the extraordinary degree of agreement in people’s feelings about patterns.292
The structure of a pattern language is created by the fact that individual patterns are not isolated.311
Each pattern then, depends both on the smaller patterns it contains, and on the larger patterns within which it is contained.312
Each pattern sits at the center of a network of connections which connect it to certain other patterns that help to complete it. […] And it is the network of these connections between patterns which creates the language.313
The language is a good one, capable of making something whole, when it is morphologically and functionally complete. […] The language is morphologically complete when I can visualize the kind of buildings which it generates very concretely. [...] And the language is functionally complete, when the system of patterns it defines is fully capable of allowing all its inner forces to resolve themselves.316-317
In both cases, the language is complete only when every individual pattern in the language is complete.318
It is essential to distinguish those patterns which are the principal components of any given pattern, from those which lie still further down.322
As we make the different individual languages, we find the patterns overlap.329
The sequence which a language gives you works because it treats the building as a whole, at every step.383
The process of unfolding goes step by step, one pattern at a time. Each step brings just one pattern to life.385
