The Timeless Way of Building, Volume 8

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 1979 - Architecture - 552 pages
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, there 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."
 

Contents

II
3
III
15
IV
17
VI
39
VII
53
IX
73
XI
99
XIII
121
XXIX
275
XXX
303
XXXII
323
XXXIV
347
XXXV
349
XXXVI
363
XXXVII
383
XXXIX
401

XV
135
XVII
153
XVIII
155
XIX
165
XXI
191
XXIII
209
XXV
223
XXVII
241
XLI
425
XLIII
453
XLV
473
XLVI
491
XLVIII
509
XLIX
527
LI
529
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page x - IX own lives, is the central search of any -person, and the crux of any individual -person's story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
Page xv - Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves, (ppix-xv) The excerpted text is the detailed Table of Contents from Christopher Alexander, TheTimetess Way of...

About the author (1979)

Christopher Alexander is a builder, craftsman, general contractor, architect, painter, and teacher. He taught from 1963 to 2002 as Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and is now Professor Emeritus. He has spent his life running construction projects, experimenting with new building methods and materials, and crafting carefully articulated buildings--all to advance the idea that people can build environments in whichthey will thrive.Acting on his deeply-held conviction that, as a society, we must recover the means by which we can build and maintain healthy living environments, he has lived and worked in many cultures, and built buildings all over the world.Making neighborhoods, building-complexes, building, balustrades, columns, ceilings, windows, tiles, ornaments, models and mockups, paintings, furniture, castings and carvings--all this has been his passion, and is the cornerstone from which his paradigm-changing principles have been derived.