The Oregon Experiment

Focusing on a plan for an extension to the University of Oregon, this book shows how any community the size of a university or small town might go about designing its own future environment with all members of the community participating personally or by representation. It is a brilliantcompanion volume to A Pattern Language.

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.

Naomi and Scanlon Pratt are at the threshold of a new life. East Coast transplants to small-town Oregon, Scanlon has a position at the local university—teaching mass movements and domestic radicalism—and Naomi is pregnant with their first child. But everything changes when they meet Clay, a troubled young anarchist who despises Scanlon’s self-serving attempts at friendship but adores Naomi. As the Pratts welcome their newborn son, their lives become so deeply entwined with Clay’s that they must decide exactly where their loyalties lie, before the increasingly volatile activism that they’ve been dabbling in engulfs them all. A love song to the Pacific Northwest, The Oregon Experiment explores the contemporary civil war between desire and betrayal, the political and the personal.

This introductory volume to Alexander's other works, A Pattern of Language and The Oregon Experiment, explains concepts fundamental to his original approaches to the theory and application of architecture.

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.

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.

"This is a most joyful and clever whimsy, the kind that lightens the heart and puts a shine on the day," raved Kirkus Reviews in a starred review. Is it possible to eat snowballs doused in ketchup—and nothing else—all winter? Can a washing machine wash dishes? By reading the step-by-step instructions, kids can discover the answers to such all-important questions along with the book's curious narrator. Here are 12 "hypotheses," as well as lists of "what you need," "what to do," and "what happened" that are sure to make young readers laugh out loud as they learn how to conduct science experiments (really!). Jenny Offill and Nancy Carpenter—the ingenious pair that brought you 17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore—have outdone themselves in this brilliant and outrageously funny book.