[Homestead] Christopher Alexander and Paul Oliver books
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Architecture---Christopher Alexander
Christopher Alexander
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
A professor-emeritus (the University of California, Berkeley) and
licensed contractor as well as architect, Christopher Alexander (born
October 4, 1936 in Vienna, Austria) is famous mostly for his popular
appeal, and his theoretical contributions. With Sarah Ishikawa and
Murray Silverstein, he produced and validated an architectural system, a
pattern language designed to empower any human being to design and build
quite well at any scale. He began the project because he believes that
users know more about the buildings they need than any architect could.
Based in England, he continues to practice architecture and consult in
planning.
Contents [showhide]
1 Life
2 Work
2.1 Writings
2.2 Buildings
3 External links
[edit]
Life
Alexander grew up in England. His education started in sciences. He was
awarded the top open scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge
University in 1954, in chemistry and physics and went on to read
mathematics. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Architecture and a
Master's degree in Mathematics. He took his doctorate in Harvard (the
first Ph.D. in Architecture ever awarded at Harvard University), and was
elected fellow at Harvard. During the same period he worked at MIT in
transportation theory and in computer science, and worked at Harvard in
cognition and cognitive studies. He became professor of Architecture at
Berkeley in 1963, taught there continously for 38 years, and is now
Professor Emeritius at the University of California. He is widely
recognized as the father of the pattern language movement in computer
science. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 1996 for his contributions to architecture.
[edit]
Work
[edit]
Writings
The Timeless Way of Building described the perfection of use to which
buildings could aspire.
"There is one timeless way of building. It is a thousand years old, and
the same today as it has ever 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. It is not possible to make great buildings, or great towns,
beautiful places, places where you feel yourself, places where you feel
alive, except by following 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. "
A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction described a
practical architectural system in a form that a theoretical
mathematician or computer scientist might call a generative grammar.
The work originated from an observation that many medieval cities are
attractive and harmonious. The authors said that this occurs because
they were built to local regulations that required specific features,
but freed the architect to adapt them to particular situations.
The book provides rules and pictures, and leaves decisions to be taken
from the precise environment of the project. It describes exact methods
for constructing practical, safe and attractive designs at every scale,
from entire regions, through cities, neighborhoods, gardens, buildings,
rooms, built-in furniture, and fixtures down to the level of doorknobs.
A notable value is that the architectural system consists only of
classic patterns tested in the real world and reviewed by multiple
architects for beauty and practicality.
The book includes all needed surveying and structural calculations, and
a novel simplified building system that copes with regional shortages of
wood and steel, uses easily-stored inexpensive materials, and produces
long-lasting classic buildings with small amounts of materials, design
and labor. It first has users prototype a structure on-site in temporary
materials. Once accepted, these are finished by filling them with
very-low-density concrete. It uses vaulted construction to build as high
as three stories, permitting very high densities.
This book's method was adopted by the University of Oregon, as described
in The Oregon Experiment, but has not been used much there, although it
remains the official building method. It has also been adopted in part
by some cities as a building code.
The idea of a pattern language appears to apply to any complex
engineering task, and has been applied to some of them. It has been
especially influential in software engineering where patterns have been
used to document collective knowledge in the field.
The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of
the Universe is his latest and major work. It consists of four volumes.
In it, he puts forward a new theory about the nature of the space around
us and describes how this theory influences thinking about architecture,
building, and so forth. The mostly static patterns from A Pattern
Language have been amended by more dynamic "sequences," which describe
how to work towards patterns (which can roughly been seen as the end
result of sequences). Sequences, like patterns, promise to be tools of
wider scope than building (just as his theory of space goes beyond
architecture).
His other books are:
* The Production of Houses
* A New Theory of Urban Design
* A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art, The Geometry of Very Early
Turkish Carpets
* The Mary Rose Museum
* Notes on the Synthesis of Form
* The Linz Cafe
Published in 2002-2003
* The Nature of Order I - IV
Buildings
Among Alexander's most notable built works are the Eishin Campus of the
University of Tokyo; the Julian Street Inn (a homeless shelter) in San
Jose, California (both described in Nature of Order); the Martinez House
(an experimental house in Martinez, California made of lightweight
concrete); and the low-cost housing in Mexicali, Mexico (described in
The Production of Houses).
[edit]
External links
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Christopher Alexander
* PatternLanguage.com (http://patternlanguage.com/)
* The Nature of Order series (http://natureoforder.com/)
* Article: New Concepts in Complex Theory. May 2003.
(http://natureoforder.com/library/scientific-introduction.pdf)
* A list of the building patterns (http://www.jacana.org.uk/pattern/)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander"
ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE WORLD'S FIRST ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF THE ARCHITECTURE
OF THE PEOPLE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the most important events in the history of recent research into
the wider horizons of architecture is doubtless the publication of Paul
Oliver's "Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World". The
successful publication was celebrated at the RIBA-building, Portland
Place, London, Dec. 4, 1997.
Paul Oliver's encyclopedia documents the results of an entirely new type
of global architectural research which had developed over the last 2 -3
decades. Over 750 specialists from more than 80 countries contributed to
it. Over approximately 2500 pages in 3 volumes it unites more than 1700
photographs and 1000 line drawings including plans, diagrams,
orthographical and computer generated projections. In addition there are
80 regional maps.
The first volume is essentially theoretical, giving more than 100
approaches and concepts. Volumes 2 and 3 geographically document
traditional architecture globally in 7 continental main areas and nearly
100 subzones. Doubtless this is the first time we get such a complete
and dense information about how the non-urban surface of the earth is
populated in regard to traditional housing. Thus, with its multilayered
grid structure covering cultural, geographical, climatic and
environmental aspects, this encyclopedia allows a highly complex and at
the same time fairly complete image of a phenomenon greatly neglected by
the disciplines of architecture as well as ethnology. This
interdisciplinary "two in one" of 'vernacular architecture' and
'architectural ethnology' may explain the importance of this
encyclopedia for architectural research.
In the framework of architecture Paul Oliver's encyclopedia opens the
awareness, that the content of the term architecture had conventionally
been extremely one sided, being restricted on aesthetically preselected
samples of Euro-mediterranen (and other) historical, or 'high'
architectures (key words: 'pyramids, temples, palaces and cathedrals')
thus greatly neglecting a huge wealth of traditional architectural forms
diffused over centuries all over the world. Evidently architectural
'theories' were greatly handicapped by this lack of knowledge and
projected Euro-Western functionalistic rationalisms onto non EuroWestern
cultures (architectural colonialism). This will change now. Architects
of many regions of the world will become aware that there are many other
ways to conceive architecture beyond EuroWestern rationalisms.
In view of the humanities and particularly in regard to ethnology, Paul
Oliver's encyclopedia provides a full fledged 'dictionary of
architectural ethnology' including agrarian house traditions
conventionally dealt with by folklore studies of various countries. The
complexity of the presentation in this encyclopedia and, particularly
the many approaches outlined in the first volume, may convince many an
ethnologist, that the human dwelling may be a valuable and important
source which expresses many aspects of human life.
With its additional comparative lexicon of 500 words (French, German,
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic), its glossary of over 1200
architectural and anthropological terms, and with its largest
bibliography on the subject today, including over 9000 references, it
may become a standard work for many interested in architectural
research: architects, anthropologists, geographers, ethnologists,
folklorists, planners, historians and conservationalists.
Remember the French 'encyclopŽdistes' (d'Alembert, Diderot, in
collaboration with Rousseau, Voltaire, Grimm, Holbach etc.) and their
impacts on what is called "enlightenment" in European thought? It may
well be possible that Paul Oliver's encyclopedia will have impacts of
'enlightenment' on the present "postmedieval myth of the profaned
creator genius" still violently virulent in post modern architecture.
And, maybe he will be considered as the "architectural encyclopedist" by
a new 'Neohumanism' in the architecture of the 21st century.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul Oliver (ed.)
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE OF THE WORLD
219 x 276 mm; ca. 2'500 pp. 1'700 halftones, 1'000 line drawings, 80 maps
ISBN: 0-521-56422-0
3 volumes hardback £ 695.-- / $ 900.-
------------------------------------------------------------------------
* For more informations (contents of vol. 1-3) see the site of
Cambridge University Press:
o http://www.cup.org/Books/oliver/oliver.html
* Using PDF format (Adobe Acrobat), you can also download a copy of
the leaflet distributed by Cambridge University Press:
o http://home.worldcom.ch/~negenter (see file "Reviews")
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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