The Timeless Way Of Building

A collection of quotes from Christopher Alexander's book the timeless way of building. Numbers in brackets denote page numbers.

Chapter 7—The multiplicity of living patterns

The "bad" patterns are unable to contain the forces which occur in them. (129)

By contrast, now that each one of the fifty patterns out of which the buildign is made is alive and self-resolving. (130)

Each pattern helps to sustain other patterns. (131)

The configuration of any one pattern requires other patterns to keep itself alive. (131)

The more life-giving patterns there are in a building (or organization) the more beautiful it seems. (134)

Chapter 10—Our pattern language

These patterns are expressed as rules of thumb, which any farmer can combine and recombine to make an infitie variety of unique barns. (179)

Each pattern is a rule whcih describes what you have to do to generate the entity which it defines. (182)

A pattern language is a system which allows its users to create an infinit variety of those three dimensional combinations of patterns which we call buildings, gardens, towns. (186)

Each of them builds by following some rules of thumb. (200)

Everybody follows rules of thumb. (201)

And all these rules of thumb—or patterns—are parts of a larger system which are languages. (202)

Every person has a pattern language in his mind. (202)

And we may conclude, even more strongly, that the central task of "architecture" is the creation of a single. shared, evolving, pattern language, which everyone contributes to and everyone can use. (241)

Now try to discover some property which is common to all the ones which feel good, and missing from the ones that don't feel good. (255)

If you can't draw it, it isn't a pattern. (267)

By contrast, patterns made from thought, without feeling, lack emperical reality entirely. (288)

When you first see a pattern, you will be able to tell almost at once, by intuition, whether it makes you feel good or not: whether you want to live in a world which has that pattern in it, because it helps you feel more alive.