Design Patterns & Living Architecture

by Nikos Salingaros

Overview

This collection of articles describes how to use design patterns to create better -- more emotionally-responsive and human -- architectural environments. The pattern concept was introduced by Christopher Alexander and his collaborators in 1977, and has enjoyed wide success outside architectural culture. For various reasons, this design method and its accompanying philosophy of adaptation have not yet entered the architectural mainstream. Nor are design patterns taught at universities on a regular basis, since academics correctly perceive them as representing the opposite of formalistic design (and clearly privilege the second methodology).

This booklet has three rather ambitious aims: To educate practicing architects and the general public on why design patterns are both useful and necessary. To explain how the pattern method applied to the built environment contains the seeds for adaptive design. To establish the scientific validity for design patterns, while invalidating methods based on fashion.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940158674662
Publisher:	Levellers Press
Publication date:	08/04/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Nikos A. Salingaros MA PhD is one of the pioneers who are defining the new architecture. This is an innovative and interactive way of conceiving, constructing, and repairing the city. The author of six monographs on architectural and urban design translated into six languages, he is on the forefront of deriving evidence-based rules for the built environment using scientific methods and logic. These rules replace outdated working assumptions that have created dysfunctional urban regions following World-War II. His work links human-scale urbanism to developing architectural movements such as P2P Urbanism, the Network City, Biophilic Design, Self-built Housing, Generative Codes, and Sustainable Architecture. A collaborative scientific approach supersedes the century-long practice where an "expert" urbanist determines the form of the build environment based upon improvable and "secret" rules, which are often nothing more than images and ideologies.

Dr. Salingaros collaborated with the visionary architect and software pioneer Christopher Alexander, helping to edit the four-volume "The Nature of Order" during its twenty-five-year gestation. In recognition of his efforts to understand architecture using scientific thinking, Salingaros was awarded the first grant ever for research on architecture by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 1997. He is a member of the INTBAU College of Traditional Practitioners and is on the INTBAU Committee of Honor. He was one of the "50 Visionaries who are Changing Your World" selected by the UTNE Reader in 2008. In Planetizen's 2009 survey, he was ranked 11th among "The Top Urban Thinkers of All Time". Salingaros is the author of over 120 scientific papers. Both an artist and scientist, he is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and is also on the architecture faculty of Università di Roma Tre, Italy and the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Campus Queretaro, Mexico.