Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674627512
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
"These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function." This book, opening with these words, presents an entirely new theory of the process of design. In the first part of the book, Christopher Alexander discusses the process by which a form is adapted to the context of human needs and demands that has called it into being. He shows that such an adaptive process will be successful only if it proceeds piecemeal instead of all at once. It is for this reason that forms from traditional un-self-conscious cultures, molded not by designers but by the slow pattern of changes within tradition, are so beautifully organized and adapted. When the designer, in our own self-conscious culture, is called on to create a form that is adapted to its context he is unsuccessful, because the preconceived categories out of which he builds his picture of the problem do not correspond to the inherent components of the problem, and therefore lead only to the arbitrariness, willfulness, and lack of understanding which plague the design of modern buildings and modern cities. In the second part, Mr. Alexander presents a method by which the designer may bring his full creative imagination into play, and yet avoid the traps of irrelevant preconception. He shows that, whenever a problem is stated, it is possible to ignore existing concepts and to create new concepts, out of the structure of the problem itself, which do correspond correctly to what he calls the subsystems of the adaptive process. By treating each of these subsystems as a separate subproblem, the designer can translate the new concepts into form. The form, because of the process, will be well-adapted to its context, non-arbitrary, and correct. The mathematics underlying this method, based mainly on set theory, is fully developed in a long appendix. Another appendix demonstrates the application of the method to the design of an Indian village.

Notes on the Synthesis of Form

Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674251911
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 118

Book Description
“These notes are about the process of design: the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function.” This book, opening with these words, presents an entirely new theory on the process of design.

A Pattern Language

Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190050357
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 1216

Book Description
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

The Production of Houses

Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195032233
Category : House construction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
As an innovative thinker about building and planning, Christopher Alexander has attracted a devoted following. His seminal books--The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, and The Oregon Experiment--defined a radical and fundamently new process of environmental design. Alexander now gives us the latest book in his series--a book that puts his theories to the test and shows what sort of production system can create the kind of environment he has envisioned. The Production of Houses centers around a group of buildings which Alexander and his associates built in 1976 in northern Mexico. Each house is different and the book explains how each family helped to lay out and construct its own home according to the family's own needs and in the framework of the pattern language. Numerous diagrams and tables as well as a variety of anecdotes make the day-today process clear. The Mexican project, however, is only the starting point for a comprehensive theory of housing production. The Production of Houses describes seven principles which apply to any system of production in any part of the world for housing of any cost in any climate or culture or at any density. In the last part of the book, "The Shift of Paradigm," Alexander describes, in detail, the devastating nature of the revolution in world view which is contained in his proposal for housing construction, and its overall implications for deep-seated cultural change.

Design Synthesis

Author: Graeme Arthur Britton
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1439881650
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
The biggest challenge in any marketplace is uncertainty. The major changes taking place in world economies, politics, and demographics has raised market uncertainty to its highest level in the past 50 years. However, with new markets opening up in emerging and developing economies, the opportunities have never been better. To compete in this challe

High-level Synthesis

Author: Michael Fingeroff
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1450097243
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
Are you an RTL or system designer that is currently using, moving, or planning to move to an HLS design environment? Finally, a comprehensive guide for designing hardware using C++ is here. Michael Fingeroff's High-Level Synthesis Blue Book presents the most effective C++ synthesis coding style for achieving high quality RTL. Master a totally new design methodology for coding increasingly complex designs! This book provides a step-by-step approach to using C++ as a hardware design language, including an introduction to the basics of HLS using concepts familiar to RTL designers. Each chapter provides easy-to-understand C++ examples, along with hardware and timing diagrams where appropriate. The book progresses from simple concepts such as sequential logic design to more complicated topics such as memory architecture and hierarchical sub-system design. Later chapters bring together many of the earlier HLS design concepts through their application in simplified design examples. These examples illustrate the fundamental principles behind C++ hardware design, which will translate to much larger designs. Although this book focuses primarily on C and C++ to present the basics of C++ synthesis, all of the concepts are equally applicable to SystemC when describing the core algorithmic part of a design. On completion of this book, readers should be well on their way to becoming experts in high-level synthesis.

The Nature of Order: The phenomenon of life

Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Nature of Order
ISBN: 0972652914
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 492

Book Description
In Book Oneof this four-volume work, Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years. This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

An Introduction to Proofs with Set Theory

Author: Daniel Ashlock
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
ISBN: 1681738805
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
This text is intended as an introduction to mathematical proofs for students. It is distilled from the lecture notes for a course focused on set theory subject matter as a means of teaching proofs. Chapter 1 contains an introduction and provides a brief summary of some background material students may be unfamiliar with. Chapters 2 and 3 introduce the basics of logic for students not yet familiar with these topics. Included is material on Boolean logic, propositions and predicates, logical operations, truth tables, tautologies and contradictions, rules of inference and logical arguments. Chapter 4 introduces mathematical proofs, including proof conventions, direct proofs, proof-by-contradiction, and proof-by-contraposition. Chapter 5 introduces the basics of naive set theory, including Venn diagrams and operations on sets. Chapter 6 introduces mathematical induction and recurrence relations. Chapter 7 introduces set-theoretic functions and covers injective, surjective, and bijective functions, as well as permutations. Chapter 8 covers the fundamental properties of the integers including primes, unique factorization, and Euclid's algorithm. Chapter 9 is an introduction to combinatorics; topics included are combinatorial proofs, binomial and multinomial coefficients, the Inclusion-Exclusion principle, and counting the number of surjective functions between finite sets. Chapter 10 introduces relations and covers equivalence relations and partial orders. Chapter 11 covers number bases, number systems, and operations. Chapter 12 covers cardinality, including basic results on countable and uncountable infinities, and introduces cardinal numbers. Chapter 13 expands on partial orders and introduces ordinal numbers. Chapter 14 examines the paradoxes of naive set theory and introduces and discusses axiomatic set theory. This chapter also includes Cantor's Paradox, Russel's Paradox, a discussion of axiomatic theories, an exposition on Zermelo‒Fraenkel Set Theory with the Axiom of Choice, and a brief explanation of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems.

Community and Privacy

Author: Serge Chermayeff
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture, Domestic
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Book Description

The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth

Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 526

Book Description
Christoper Alexander's always controversial work raises issues critical to regenerating the environment and creating a new culture for building--and rebuilding--our cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and gardens. Demonstrates the application of Alexander's theories and methods to a large-scale project and shows how architecture can bring life to a community. The creative processes described in the book are for anyone who designs, builds, shapes, repairs, or otherwise modifies the built environment.