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:
“If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will—the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)