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  • From: tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: RGod2 AT aol.com, homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
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  • Subject: [Homestead] Christopher Alexander and Paul Oliver books
  • Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:34:19 -0500



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
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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.
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Work
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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).
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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")

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to Home page <http://home.worldcom.ch/%7Enegenter/index.html>








  • [Homestead] Christopher Alexander and Paul Oliver books, tvoivozhd, 02/10/2005

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