Dan Boland 03 Jun 05

Oops… looks like you need to add a clear: left to your stylesheet. ;D

Ty West 04 Jun 05

Elegant simplicity. Where have I seen this before?

indi 04 Jun 05

amazing how much our mood can affect our perceptions … I’m tired and worn out and so these look kind of drap and dreary … I’ll have to look again after resting :-)

Mr. Joel Dueck 04 Jun 05

It is refreshing to find a modern architect who designs for the human being and not for the glossy photo-world of coffee table books. However, the framework outlined in Timeless Way, Pattern Language has less to do with architecture per se, than it has to do with social engineering, and in it he displays little to no flexibility. The design vocabulary of cities & outdoor spaces of the Great Plains, for example, is utterly foreign to his framework, which implicitly calls for and venerates high population densities.

The pictures are great, but they do not tell the whole story. Mr. Alexander uses design as a thin envelope for his peculiar social gospel, while human-friendly spaces are created all the time by people with far less pretension than he.

Peter Mentzer 05 Jun 05

Christopher Alexander has written a number of books I’d recommend highly to anyone interested in design principles. Although he is an architect, his thoughts on design are applicable to everything — from graphic design, to painting, to music composition. “A Pattern Language” and “The Timeless Way of Building” and my personal faves.

The latter is a good primer, and bit more accessible than the former. He composed the book to be “scanable”, and even mentions in the beginning that you can just pick it up and flip through it, or read it in a non-linear way. Pretty interesting precog of the upcoming nature of information architecture for the internet, seeing as the book was published in 1979.