Book Description
This volume provides the opening work in Christopher Alexander's seminal trilogy on architecture (continued in A Pattern Language and The Oregon Experiment). Here he provides a fascinating introduction to the ideas behind the succeeding two books.
A Timeless Way of Building ANNOTATION
This volume is an introduction to the ideas behind A Pattern Language and The Oregon Experiment.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The Timeless Way of Building is the first in a series of books which describe an entirely new attitude to architecture and planning. The books are intended to provide a complete working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building, and planning - an alternative which will, we hope, gradually replace current ideas and practices.
SYNOPSIS
The theory of architecture implicit in our world today, Christopher Alexander believes, is bankrupt. More and more people are aware that something is deeply wrong. Yet the power of present-day ideas is so great that many feel uncomfortable, even afraid, to say openly that they dislike what is happening, because they are afraid to seem foolish, afraid perhaps that they will be laughed at.
Now, at last, here is a coherent theory which describes in modern terms an architecture as ancient as human society itself.
The Timeless Way of Building is the introductory volume in the Center for Environmental Structure series. Christopher Alexander presents in it a new theory of architecture, building, and planning which has at its core that age-old process by which the people of a society have always pulled the order of their world from their own being.
Alexander writes, "There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills,and as our faces are."
Art & Photography
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