Christopher alexander - A pattern language

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Keep the medical teams small and independent—small services without red tape (81), but coordinated with each other and other clinics, like birth places (65)—throughout the town. Give each center some functions that fuse with the ordinary course of local work and recreation: swimming pool, workshops, sauna, gym, vegetable garden, greenhouse. But don’t force these facilities to form a continuous “health park”—knit them together loosely with other parts of the town—housing in between (48), local sports (72), adventure playcround (73), home workshop (157), vegetable garden (177). Perhaps the most important subsidiary pattern for helping people to keep healthy is the opportunity for swimming; ideally, try and put a swimming pool on every block—still water (71). . . .

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SUMMARY OF THE LANGUAGE

172. GARDEN GROWING WILD

173. GARDEN WALL

174. TRELLISED WALK

175. GREENHOUSE

176. GARDEN SEAT

177. VEGETABLE GARDEN

178. COMPOST

179. ALCOVES

180. WINDOW PLACE I 8 I. THE FIRE

182. EATING ATMOSPHERE

183. WORKSPACE ENCLOSURE

184. COOKING LAYOUT

185. SITTING CIRCLE

186. COMMUNAL SLEEPING

187. MARRIAGE BED

188. BED ALCOVE

189. DRESSING ROOM

190. CEILING HEIGHT VARIETY

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48 HOUSING IN BETWEEN**

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. . . most housing is in residential neighborhoods, and in the dusters within neighborhoods—identifiable neighborhood (14), house cluster (37); and according to our patterns these housing areas need to be separated by boundaries which contain public land and work communities—subculture boundary (13), NEIGHBORHOOD BOUNDARY (15), WORK COMMUNITY (41). But even these work communities, and boundaries, and shopping streets, must contain houses which have people living in them.

The personal rhythms of maintenance and repair are central to the well being of any part of a community, because it is only these rhythms which keep up a steady sequence of adaptations and corrections in the organization of the whole. Slums happen when these rhythms break down.

Now in a town, the processes of maintenance and repair hinge on the fact of user ownership. In other words, the places where people are user-owners are kept up nicely; the places where they are not, tend to run down. When people have their own homes among shops, workplaces, schools, services, the university, these places are enhanced by the vitality that is natural to their homes. They extend themselves to make it personal and comfortable. A person will put more of himself into his home than into any of the other places where he spends his time. And it is unlikely that a person can put this kind of feeling into two places, two parts of his life. We conclude that many parts of the environment have the arid quality of not being cared for personally, for the simple reason that indeed nobody lives there.

It is only where houses are mixed in between the other functions, in twos and threes, in rows and tiny clusters, that the personal quality of the households and house-building activities gives energy to the workshops and offices and services.

TOWNS

Therefore:

Build houses into the fabric of shops, small industry, schools, public services, universities—all those parts of cities which draw people in during the day, but which tend to be “nonresidential.” The houses may be in rows or “hills” with shops beneath, or they may be free-standing, so long as they mix with the other functions, and make the entire area “lived-in.”

Z

occasional houses

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Make sure that, in spite of its position in a public area, each house still has enough private territory for people to feel at home in it—your own home (79). If there are several houses in one area, treat them as a cluster or as a row—house cluster (37), row houses (38). . . .

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between the home clusters and work communities , allow the local road and path network to grow informally , 'piecemeal:

49 LOOPED LOCAL ROADS**

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. . . assume that neighborhoods, house dusters, work communities, and major roads are more or less defined—local transport

AREAS ( I I ) , IDENTIFIABLE NEIGHBORHOOD ( I 4) , PARALLEL ROADS (23), HOUSE CLUSTER (37), WORK COMMUNITY (41). NOW, for the layout of the local roads.

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Through traffic is fast, noisy, and dangerous. At the same time cars are important, and cannot be excluded altogether from the areas where people live. Local roads must provide access to houses but prevent traffic from coming through.

This problem can only be solved if all roads which have houses on them are laid out to be “loops.” We define a looped road as any road in a road network so placed that no path along other roads in the road network can be shortened by travel along the “loop.”

The loops themselves must be designed to discourage high volumes or high speeds: this depends on the total number of houses served by the loop, the road surface, the road width, and the number of curves and corners. Our observations suggest that a loop can be made safe so long as it serves less than 50 cars. At one and one-half cars per house, such a loop serves 30 houses; at one car per house, 50 houses; at one-half car per house, 100 houses.

Here is an example of an entire system of looped local roads designed for a community of 1500 houses in Peru.

Looped local roads in Lima.

26 I

Even a simple grid can be changed to have looped local roads.