A New Theory of Urban Design

Christopher Alexander, Hajo Neis, Artemis Anninou Oxford University Press,

19/11/1987 251 pginas

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, the newest in a highly-acclaimed series by
the Center for Environmental Structure, 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.

A new theory of urban design Introduction of the book

In this book we describe an experiment which we did in 1978. The
experiment was extensive, and involved a large number of people, over a
long period of time.
When it was finished we decided that we must write it up. It seemed too
important to leave unpublished.
At the same time, it was very hard to describe exactly what we had
achieved. We had a manuscript which described the experiment. But even
the manuscript left it unclear just what we had achieved. During the last six
years, we have come back to the manuscript from time to time, trying to
decide how to describe the work we did in this experiment.
Finally, after considering many possible interpretations of what we had
done, we realized that we had was, quite simply, a new theory of urban
design. This isnt something that we set out to create. And there is a danger
that the title might seem pretentious because what we have is very
incomplete.
On the other hand, A new theory of urban design really does describe what
we have, we have a formulation of an entirely new way of looking at urban
design,
design together with a detailed experiment which shows, in part, what this
new theory can do. The fact that the theory is so far still full of holes, and
incomplete, doesnt alter the fact that it is, in principle, an entirely new
theory, and so, for this reason, we have let the title stand.

When we look at the most beautiful towns and cities of the past, we are
always impressed by a feeling that they are somehow organic.
This feeling of organicness is not a vague feeling of relationship with
biological forms. It is not analogy. It is instead, an accurate vision of a
specific structural quality which these old towns had and have. Namely:
each of these towns grew as a whole, under its own laws of wholeness and
we can feel this wholeness, not only at the largest scale, but in every detail:
in the restaurants, in the sidewalks, in the houses, shops, markets, roads,
parks, gardens and walls. Even in the balconies and ornaments.
This quality does not exist in towns being built today. And indeed, this
quality could not exist, at present, because there isnt any discipline which
actively sets out to create it. Neither architecture, nor urban design, nor city
planning, take the creation of this kind of wholeness as their task. So of
course it doesnt exist. It does not exist, because it is not being attempt.
There is no discipline that could create it, because there isnt, really, any
discipline which has yet tried to do it.
City planning definitely does not try to create wholeness. It is merely
preoccupied with implementation of certain ordinances. Architecture is too

much preoccupied with problems of individual buildings. And urban design

has of dilettantism: as if the problem could be solved on a visual level, as a
aesthetic matter. However, at least the phrase urban design does
somehow conjure up the sense of the city as a complex thing which must be
dealt with in three dimensions, not two.
We have therefore used the phrase urban design in the title of this book,
since it seems to us that urban design, of all existing disciplines, is the one
which comes closest to accepting responsibility for their citys wholeness.
But we propose a discipline of urban design which is differently, entirely,
from the one known today, we believe the task of creating wholeness in the
city can only be dealt with a process. It cannot be solved by design alone,
but only when the process by which the city gets its form is fundamentally
changed.
Thus, in our view,, it is the process above all which is responsible for
wholeness,
wholeness not merely the form. If we create a suitable process there is
some hope that the city might become whole once again. If we do not
change the process, there is no hope at all.
This book is a first step in defining such a process.

Christopher Alexander is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus

Professor of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is the father of the Pattern Language movement in computer science,
and A Pattern Language, a seminal work that was perhaps the first complete
book ever written in hypertext fashion.
He has designed and built more than two hundred buildings on five
continents: many of these buildings lay the ground work of a new form of
architecture, which looks far into the future, yet has roots in ancient
traditions. Much of his work has been based on inventions in technology,
including, especially, inventions in concrete, shell design, and contracting
procedures needed to attain a living architecture.
He was the founder of the Center for Environmental Structure in 1967, and
remains President of that Company until today. In 2000, he founded
PatternLanguage.com, and is Chairman of the Board. He has been a
consultant to city, county, and national governments on every continent,
has advised corporations, government agencies, and architects and
planners throughout the world.
Alexander was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1996, is a fellow of the Swedish Royal Society, has been the recipient of
innumerable architectural prizes and honors including the gold medal for
research of the American Institute of Architects, awarded in 1970.
He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1936. He was raised in England, and holds
a Master's Degree in Mathematics and a Bachelor's degree in Architecture
from Cambridge University, and a PhD in Architecture from Harvard
University.
In 1958 he moved to the United States, and has lived in Berkeley, California
from 1963 until the present.

... His grasp of the fundamental truths of traditional ways of building, and
his understanding of what gives life and beauty and true functionality to
towns and buildings,
buildings is put forth in a context that sheds light

... 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

OVERVIEW
Here is acclaimed architect Christopher Alexander's four-volume
masterwork: the result of 27 years of research and a lifetime of profoundly
original thinking.
Alexander has advanced a new theory of architecture, matter, and
organization, that has attracted thousands of readers and practical followers
throughout the world. His grasp of the fundamental truths of traditional
ways of building, and his understanding of what gives life and beauty and
true functionality to towns and buildings,
buildings is put forth in a context that sheds
light on the character of order in all phenomena. Taken even further,
hundreds of examples are given to show how the theory has been put to use
in his many projects around the world.
The four books of The Nature of Order redefine architecture for the 21st
century as a field, as a profession, as practice and as social philosophy. Each
of the books deals with one facet of the discipline. This worldview provides
architecture with a new underpinning, describing procedures of planning,
design, and building, as well as attitudes to style, to the shapes of buildings,
and to the forms of urbanization and construction. Here is an entirely new
way of thinking about the world. As one writer has expressed it, "The books
provide the language for the construction and transition to a new kind of
society, rooted in the nature of human beings."
The four books, each one an essay on the topic of living structure, are
connected and interdependent. Each sheds light on one facet of living
structure: first, the definition; second, the process of generating living
structure; third, the practical vision of an architecture guided by the concept
of living structure; and fourth, the cosmological underpinnings and
implications brought into being by the idea of living structure.
The books offer a view of a human-centered universe, a view of order, in
which the soul, or human feeling and the soul, play a central role. Here,
experiments are not only conceivable in the abstract Cartesian mode, but a

new class of experiments relying on human feeling as a form of

measurement, show us definitively the foundation of all architecture as
something which resides in human beings. Whether this "something," which
is demonstrated and discussed throughout the four books, is to be regarded
as a new entity underlying matter, or what used to be called the "soul," is
left for the reader to decide.
Taken as a whole the four books create a sweeping new conception of the
nature of things which is both objective and structural (hence part of
science) and also personal (in that it shows how and why things have the
power to touch the human heart). A step has been taken, through
which these two domains the domain of geometrical structure and
the feeling it creates kept separate during four centuries of
scientific thought, have finally been united.
The four volumes can be read separately, independently, and in any order.
However, it is together as a whole that they have their greatest impact. For
each book explores comprehensively different aspects of the coherence of
our universe, and brings us at last to being at one with it.
These concepts reach far beyond the field of architecture. Scholars and
practitioners in many fields are finding the relevance of these ideas to their
own areas of study and practice - physics, biology, philosophy, cosmology,
anthropology, computer science, and religious studies, to name a few.
http://www.natureoforder.com/overview.htm
For a description of each of the four books, please use these links.

Book 1:
The Phenomenon of Life

Book 3:
A Vision of a Living
World

Book 2:
The Process of Creating
Life

Book 4:
The Luminous Ground