Page 8 RAIN Aug./Sept. 1980 The Timeless Way ofBuilding, Christopher Alexander, 552 pp., 1979, $19.50; A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander et al., 1977, 1171 pp., $39.50; The Oregon Experiment, Chrisfopher Alexander et al., 1975, 191 pp., $17.95. Available from: Oxford University Press . 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 ORGANIC DESIGN Facilitating Community Planning Th~se three volumes are undeniably valuable-as tools, as inspiration, as a way of making connections between the way we live and the buildings that we live in. "Language" is the tool for all our work-it is only through words that the "designer" can tell the carpenter where to put the bathroom. But our common knowledge of design has been usurped by a technical vocabulary and an elite grammar which are beyond the reach of most folks. Alexander and the people he works with at the Center for Environmental Structure, in Berkeley, CA, are trying to save that aspect of our common wealth that has nearly been lost. In homes, in workspaces, in communities the work of designing our own environments is invariably handed over to ''professionals"- but planners, architects and designers need to be able to work with the people whom, in conventional terms, they are working/or. Volume I, The Timeless Way ofBuilding, describes the global heritage of man-made environments. The "T~meless W~y" is an architecture without ego-it is what I make, added to what you make, each one allowing for the other's presence. When we build, we should do so according to the real needs that we feel every day (we need sunny places, quiet places, places to work, to play, to make noise, to.make love . . .). If we can build with this in mind we may discover what Alexander calls a "pattern which lives": This discovery "is not different from the discovery of any profound thing. It is a slow deliberate process, tentative, in which we seek to discover something profound, and where we recognize that we shall usually be wrong to start with, and that we may only approach a •proper formulation slowly." The second volume of the series, A Pattern Language, is the meat of the series. It describes in detail 250 or so "patter~s" each of which examines a problem and a solution. The work is unusual in that each pattern is inextricably connected to all the others. It is this richness of connections that, in the end, satisfies our basic needs and our desires for "community." Take, for example, Pattern 21, Four Story Limit: There is abundant evidence to show that high • buildings make people crazy. The evidence is extensively documented. The pattern itself is cross-referenced to many others that concern urban environments and the people that live in them. The chil- .dren of Glasgow have a song about tenements that they can't live in because they can't get their daily snack when it's thrown from a 20story window: The feely Piece Song, by Adam McNaughton (from A Pattern Language) Oh, ye canny fling pieces oot a twenty-storey flat, Seven hundred hungry weans will testify tae that, If it's butter, cheese or jeely, if the breid is plain or pan, The odds against it reachin' us.is nintey-nine tae wan.
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