"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.

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 venerable cities of the past, such as Venice or Amsterdam, convey a feeling of wholeness, an organic unity that surfaces in every detail, large and small, in restaurants, shops, public gardens, even in balconies and ornaments. But this sense of wholeness is lacking in modern urban design, with architects absorbed in problems of individual structures, and city planners preoccupied with local ordinances, it is almost impossible to achieve. In this groundbreaking volume, architect and planner Christopher Alexander presents a new theory of urban design which attempts to recapture the process by which cities develop organically. To discover the kinds of laws needed to create a growing whole in a city, Alexander proposes here a preliminary set of seven rules which embody the process at a practical level and which are consistent with the day-to-day demands of urban development. He then puts these rules to the test, setting out with a number of his graduate students to simulate the urban redesign of a high-density part of San Francisco, initiating a project that encompassed some ninety different design problems, including warehouses, hotels, fishing piers, a music hall, and a public square. This extensive experiment is documented project by project, with detailed discussion of how each project satisfied the seven rules, accompanied by floorplans, elevations, street grids, axonometric diagrams and photographs of the scaled-down model which clearly illustrate the discussion. A New Theory of Urban Design provides an entirely new theoretical framework for the discussion of urban problems, one that goes far to remedy the defects which cities have today.

The Evolution of Designs tells the history of the many analogies that have been made, since the end of the eighteenth century, between the evolution of organisms and the human production of artefacts – especially buildings.

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.

Virtual environments such as games and animated and "real" movies require realistic sound effects that can be integrated by computer synthesis. The book emphasizes physical modeling of sound and focuses on real-world interactive sound effects. It is intended for game developers, graphics programmers, developers of virtual reality systems and traini

The Leading Integrated Chemical Process Design Guide: Now with New Problems, New Projects, and More More than ever, effective design is the focal point of sound chemical engineering. Analysis, Synthesis, and Design of Chemical Processes, Third Edition, presents design as a creative process that integrates both the big picture and the small details–and knows which to stress when, and why. Realistic from start to finish, this book moves readers beyond classroom exercises into open-ended, real-world process problem solving. The authors introduce integrated techniques for every facet of the discipline, from finance to operations, new plant design to existing process optimization. This fully updated Third Edition presents entirely new problems at the end of every chapter. It also adds extensive coverage of batch process design, including realistic examples of equipment sizing for batch sequencing; batch scheduling for multi-product plants; improving production via intermediate storage and parallel equipment; and new optimization techniques specifically for batch processes. Coverage includes Conceptualizing and analyzing chemical processes: flow diagrams, tracing, process conditions, and more Chemical process economics: analyzing capital and manufacturing costs, and predicting or assessing profitability Synthesizing and optimizing chemical processing: experience-based principles, BFD/PFD, simulations, and more Analyzing process performance via I/O models, performance curves, and other tools Process troubleshooting and “debottlenecking” Chemical engineering design and society: ethics, professionalism, health, safety, and new “green engineering” techniques Participating successfully in chemical engineering design teams Analysis, Synthesis, and Design of Chemical Processes, Third Edition, draws on nearly 35 years of innovative chemical engineering instruction at West Virginia University. It includes suggested curricula for both single-semester and year-long design courses; case studies and design projects with practical applications; and appendixes with current equipment cost data and preliminary design information for eleven chemical processes–including seven brand new to this edition.