Pattern (architecture) - Alexander's Idea of Patterns

Alexander's Idea of Patterns

Alexander's patterns seek to provide a source of proven ideas for individuals and communities to use in constructing their living and working environment. As such their aim is both aesthetic and political: to show how beautiful, comfortable and flexible built environments can be constructed, and to enable those people who will inhabit those environments to challenge any solution forced upon them.

A pattern records the design decisions taken by many builders in many places over many years in order to resolve a particular problem. Alexander describes a problem in terms of the so-called forces that act in it, and the solution is said to resolve those forces.

Read more about this topic:  Pattern (architecture)

Famous quotes containing the words idea and/or patterns:

    For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
    Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sunflecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)