A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

Christopher Alexander

created: 2022.09.13. 15:40 · modified: 2025.12.31. 13:02 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

I bought this book for 3,000 won at the Student Welfare Committee’s book market last fall semester, and I’m only just getting around to reading it. With the previous books, I posted about them after I’d finished reading them. But I have a feeling I won’t finish this one unless I publicly commit to it before I start. It’s a whopping 1,100 pages. They say telling people around you makes it easier to quit smoking, right? If you see me anytime soon, ask me, “Have you finished A Pattern Language yet?” Just to be clear, I don’t smoke.

This book caught my eye from the moment I saw its title on the Student Welfare Committee’s book list. It seems to break down the environments we live in into individual elements [patterns], analyze them, and then present the problems and solutions associated with each. I say “seems” because I haven’t finished the book yet. I’ve only just read the translator’s preface and the introduction, but so far it’s not far from what I expected when I bought it.

Each pattern can be very broad or quite specific, so the patterns form a hierarchy. A pattern is essential to the patterns above it and is, in turn, completed by the patterns below it. By defining these individual patterns and recombining them, the author aims to present a method [language] for creating better environments for human life.

The book’s approach to architecture seems remarkably similar to mathematics. The process of combining the most basic patterns into spaces we can actually use is much like deriving various propositions from a few axioms within a particular axiomatic system. As it turns out, the author studied architecture and mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

Apparently, this approach has also drawn a great deal of criticism. As the translator notes in the preface, architecture must account for countless external factors beyond the goal of creating good spaces, so idealized thinking of the kind found in mathematics is of little practical use. But the translator argues that, “even if it is difficult to put into practice, this approach to design is highly meaningful because it proposed and tested a democratic, participatory design process involving the social groups who actually use a building.” I wholeheartedly agree.

There’s a piece called “A Rational World” that I’ve been dragging my feet on for the past month or two. Briefly, it asks what the world would look like if we threw out customary units like seven days to a week and twelve months to a year and redefined everything in a more “common-sense” way. Of course, any attempt to put that into practice would face resistance from a society accustomed to so many conventions. But if conventions gradually change, there’s value in such an exercise—whether to suggest a better direction for that change or simply for the fun of imagining a world that worked differently. I feel that the thinking that led me to start writing that piece has something in common with the author’s.

That’s a lot to say after reading just the introduction. Time to get started for real~