Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander was an Austrian-born British-American architect and design theorist. He was an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software, and sociology. Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor.
A design pattern is the re-usable form of a solution to a design problem. The idea was introduced by the architect Christopher Alexander and has been adapted for various other disciplines, particularly software engineering.
Lincos is a constructed language first described in 1960 by Dr. Hans Freudenthal in his book Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse, Part 1. It is a language designed to be understandable by any possible intelligent extraterrestrial life form, for use in interstellar radio transmissions. Freudenthal considered that such a language should be easily understood by beings not acquainted with any Earthling syntax or language. Lincos was designed to be capable of encapsulating "the whole bulk of our knowledge".
A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. For instance, a data model may specify that the data element representing a car be composed of a number of other elements which, in turn, represent the color and size of the car and define its owner.
In software engineering, a design pattern describes a relatively small, well-defined aspect of a computer program in terms of how to write the code.
A pattern language is an organized and coherent set of patterns, each of which describes a problem and the core of a solution that can be used in many ways within a specific field of expertise. The term was coined by architect Christopher Alexander and popularized by his 1977 book A Pattern Language.
Pattern in architecture is the idea of capturing architectural design ideas as archetypal and reusable descriptions. The term pattern in this context is usually attributed to Christopher Alexander, an Austrian born American architect. The patterns serve as an aid to design cities and buildings. The concept of having collections of "patterns", or typical samples as such, is much older. One can think of these collections as forming a pattern language, whereas the elements of this language may be combined, governed by certain rules.
A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction is a 1977 book on architecture, urban design, and community livability. It was authored by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, with writing credits also to Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. Decades after its publication, it is still one of the best-selling books on architecture.
The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe (ISBN 0-9726529-0-6) is a four-volume work by the architect Christopher Alexander published in 2002–2004. In his earlier work, Alexander attempted to formulate the principles that lead to a good built environment as patterns, or recurring design solutions. However, he came to believe that patterns themselves are not enough to generate life in buildings and cities, and that one needs a "morphogenetic" understanding of the formation of the built environment as well as a deep understanding of how the makers get in touch with the creative process.
The Oregon Experiment is a 1975 book by Christopher Alexander and collaborators Murray Silverstein, Shlomo Angel, Sara Ishikawa, and Denny Abrams. It describes an experimental approach to campus community planning at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon which resulted in a theory of architecture and planning described in the group's later published and better-known volumes A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building.
Notes on the Synthesis of Form is a book by Christopher Alexander about the process of design.
Networked learning is a process of developing and maintaining connections with people and information, and communicating in such a way so as to support one another's learning. The central term in this definition is connections. It adopts a relational stance in which learning takes place both in relation to others and in relation to learning resources. In design and practice, networked learning is intended to facilitate evolving sets of connections between learners and their interpersonal communities, knowledge contexts, and digital technologies.
Architectural theory is the act of thinking, discussing, and writing about architecture. Architectural theory is taught in all architecture schools and is practiced by the world's leading architects. Some forms that architecture theory takes are the lecture or dialogue, the treatise or book, and the paper project or competition entry. Architectural theory is often didactic, and theorists tend to stay close to or work from within schools. It has existed in some form since antiquity, and as publishing became more common, architectural theory gained an increased richness. Books, magazines, and journals published an unprecedented number of works by architects and critics in the 20th century. As a result, styles and movements formed and dissolved much more quickly than the relatively enduring modes in earlier history. It is to be expected that the use of the internet will further the discourse on architecture in the 21st century.
An architectural pattern is a general, reusable resolution to a commonly occurring problem in software architecture within a given context. The architectural patterns address various issues in software engineering, such as computer hardware performance limitations, high availability and minimization of a business risk. Some architectural patterns have been implemented within software frameworks.
Software analysis patterns or analysis patterns in software engineering are conceptual models, which capture an abstraction of a situation that can often be encountered in modelling. An analysis pattern can be represented as "a group of related, generic objects (meta-classes) with stereotypical attributes, behaviors, and expected interactions defined in a domain-neutral manner."
Nikos Angelos Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect Christopher Alexander, with whom Salingaros shares a harsh critical analysis of conventional modern architecture. Like Alexander, Salingaros has proposed an alternative theoretical approach to architecture and urbanism that is more adaptive to human needs and aspirations, and that combines rigorous scientific analysis with deep intuitive experience.
A Theory of Architecture is a book on architecture by Nikos Salingaros, published in 2006 by Umbau-Verlag, Solingen, Germany ISBN 3-937954-07-4. Cover recommendations are by Kenneth G. Masden II, Duncan G. Stroik, Michael Blowhard, and Dean A. Dykstra. Preface by Prince Charles, and Foreword by Kenneth G. Masden II. This book is a re-working of previously published articles used to teach a senior architecture studio class. Four of the twelve chapters were originally written in collaboration, and the co-authors include Michael Mehaffy, Terry Mikiten, Debora Tejada, and Hing-Sing Yu.
Michael West Mehaffy is an urbanist, architectural theorist, urban philosopher, researcher, educator, and executive director of Sustasis Foundation, based in Portland, Oregon, USA.
Building typology refers to building and documenting buildings according to their essential characteristics. In architectural discourse, typological classification tends to focus on building function (use), building form, or architectural style. A functional typology collects buildings into groups such as houses, hospitals, schools, shopping centers, etc. A formal typology groups buildings according to their shape, scale, and site placement, etc. Lastly, a stylistic typology borrows from art history and identifies building types by their expressive traits, e.g. Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, baroque, rococo, gothic, arts and crafts, international, post-modern, etc.
