NEW THEORY DESIGN CESS C

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. About the Author: Christopher Alexander winner of the first medal for research ever awarded by the American Institute of Architects is a practicing architect and contractor Professor of Architecture at the University of California Berkeley and Director of the Center for Environmental Structure.