You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their wor...

The Silk Road conjures images of the exotic and the unknown. Most travellers simply pass along it. Brit Chris Alexander chose to live there. Ostensibly writing a guidebook, Alexander found life at the heart of the glittering madrassahs, mosques and minarets of the walled city of Khiva - a remote desert oasis in Uzbekistan - immensely alluring, and stayed.Immersing himself in the language and rich cultural traditions Alexander discovers a world torn between Marx and Mohammed - a plac...

In 1965, the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander published a landmark theoretical critique of modern urban design, and by extension, modern design in general. His critique was different from others of the day in that it was not based on a social or political argument, but on a structural analysis, rooted in then-emerging insights from the fields of mathematics and cognition. Here, published again on its fiftieth anniversary, is Alexander’s classic text, together with new in...

Christopher Alexander's series of ground-breaking books including A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building have pointed to fundamental truths of the way we build, revealing what gives life and beauty and true functionality to our buildings and towns. Now, in The Nature of Order, Alexander explores the properties of life itself, highlighting a set of well-defined structures present in all order - and in all life - from micro-organisms and mountain range...

Christopher Alexander was sent to Afghanistan in 2003,charged with supporting the NATO-led InternationalSecurity Assistance Force, part of the global response to 9/11. Primarily covering the years 2001 to 2011, The Long Way Back tells the story of the historic achievements and bitter disappointments encountered on the road to political stability in Afghanistan.But this is much more than a first-hand account of recent events: it is a clear-eyed take on what ha...

Christopher Alexander's series of ground-breaking books including A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building have pointed to fundamental truths of the way we build, revealing what gives life and beauty and true functionality to our buildings and towns. Now, in The Nature of Order, Alexander explores the properties of life itself, highlighting a set of well-defined structures present in all order - and in all life - from micro-organisms and mountain range...

Christopher Alexander's series of ground-breaking books including A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building have pointed to fundamental truths of the way we build, revealing what gives life and beauty and true functionality to our buildings and towns. Now, in The Nature of Order, Alexander explores the properties of life itself, highlighting a set of well-defined structures present in all order - and in all life - from micro-organisms and mountain range...

Scientifically, this is perhaps the most exciting of the four books. How do beautiful creations come into being? Nature can make an infinite number of human faces, each one unique, each one beautiful. The same is true for daffodils, streams, and stars. But man-made creations - especially the towns and buildings of the 20th century - have only occasionally been really good, more often mediocre, and in the last 50 years have most often been deadly.What is the reason for the differenc...

Three textile roads tangle their way through Central Asia. The famous Silk Road united east and west through trade. Older still was the Wool Road, of critical importance when houses made from wool enabled nomads to traverse the inhospitable winter steppes. Then there was the Cotton Road, marked by greed, colonialism and environmental disaster.At this intersection of human history, fortunes were made and lost through shimmering silks, life-giving felts and gossamer cottons. Chris As...

“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, Christopher 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 o...

Christopher Burford may be the most gifted intuitive, psychic, medium, and viewer on the planet today. He has been a beautiful guiding light in my life and my students lives. And now I am excited that he put his teaching and experiences into a book so people can open the doorway to their natural gifts and live in the presence of self-love and mastery. I believe that this book will truly help people to manifest their destiny and be cocreators of harmony! Kimmie Rose Morgan Chris is genuine;...

The first edition of Tunisia was released just nine months before the eruption of the Arab Spring. The most substantial period of political unrest felt by the Arab world in a half century originated in Tunisia, a fact that confounded expectations about Tunisian politics. This new edition builds upon the first edition’s overview of Tunisia’s political and economic development to examine how one of the region’s hardiest authoritarian orders was toppled by a loosely organised protest...