"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, Mr. 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 unselfconscious 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. Theform, 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.
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