Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Harvard Paperbacks)
Notes on the Synthesis of Form Harvard 0674627512

Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Harvard Paperbacks)

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Harvard University Press

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978067462751

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"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.
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Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Harvard Paperbacks) Specs:
Product NameNotes on the Synthesis of Form (Harvard Paperbacks)
ManufacturerHarvard University Press
Product Number MPN0674627512
Retail Price $20.50
EAN-1409780674627512
UPC978067462751
Specifications 
TitleNotes on the Synthesis of Form, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Harvard Paperbacks)
ISBN0674627512
Author(s)Christopher W. Alexander
Release DateJune, 1970, 1970-06-01
FormatPaperback
Num of Pages224
Num. of Items1
EAN9780674627512
Weight0.6 lbs.
Deal first added on:22-January-2004

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Latest 6 Reviews
Here is what people are saying about the Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Harvard Paperbacks)
5 Star Rating  "A life-changing book"2008-06-02
- Reviewed By User: A24OSZBAYZCPZ1
Certainly, this book has produced a great impact on various fields related to design and architecture. The author tells us about the most amazing process in human life -- the conscious process of creating things. He has a good mathematical background and is very practical in his hypotheses.

I bought this book because I heard that his theories led to the concepts of design patterns in programming. As a software developer I think that every modern program is a design problem even if it is a pure server-side software. You have to take into account a huge amount of factors and analyze lots of third party components before you come to a relatively optimal solution. Talking in Christopher's terms, the software is a form which we have to synthesize. And his ideas are still actual after more than 40 years.

If you are a real software developer, you'll certainly be delighted in reading this book. It may even change your life.
 
4 Star Rating  "deep insights, bold suggestions"2008-01-04
- Reviewed By sexythang
A deep and nuanced analysis of patterns in design failures and successes - the author clearly has astounding comprehension of the modern design situation. I found the "unselfconscious design" vs "selfconscious design" analysis fascinating (although to be politically correct it should be something like "self designer" and "delegated designer" instead). The determination and use of (relatively) independent sub-systems to prune the overall design space is profound.

Part 2 (chapter 6, page 73) is a highly structured "program" for design. I found this section of the book much less compelling, and I'm not sure how it necessarily falls out from Part 1. For me, Alexander's biggest insight is that a good design process involves iterative periods of change and stasis - specifically, designing by modifying single (or small numbers of) factors individually and allowing the design to reach "equilibrium" before making additional changes. From this standpoint, designing a whole village at the beginning (as is started in appendix I) may not ever be a good design approach - even with Alexander's "program"
 
3 Star Rating  "Read Appendix I first, to see if you need to read the rest of the book"2007-12-30
- Reviewed By jon_aquino
Tip: Start by reading Appendix I. It is an example of the technique that the author spends the whole book explaining. In fact, Appendix I may be all you need to get the gist of the technique.
 
5 Star Rating  "Art anticipates Science?"2005-08-30
- Reviewed By User: A13CV160W4HR53
Alexanders 'Notes' anticipates the paths that major sciences would take decades after its publication.

This is no mean feat for a work of science but here youre dealing with a book on architecture- or better, on what architecture could and ought to be.

readers with scientific interests will notice Alexander inventing- from purely architectural phenomena - such models as
fitness landscapes, adaptation measures according to 'gene' frequency, evolutionarily stable strategies.

The general system of analysis in the book serves as one of the best guides for understanding cellular automata and the startegy of isolating variables anticipates the justly famous work of Dawkins on selfish genes.

Alexander had almost nothing to work with in the early sixties apart from some pioneering formulations in early AI and a very acute insight into the paradoxes of optimisation strategies.

His foresight is best witnessed by reading the footnotes to the book which are in themselves an uncanny selection of what would come to dominate epistemology, evolution and modelling decades later.

People teaching history and philosophy of science should prescribe this book as the pre-eminent case study 'consilience'

On the strength of this one book, Alexander joins C S Pierce, Boole, Babbage and Minsky as one of the greatest pathfinders in the recent history of knowledge-- too bad that architecture as a discipline hardly rose to his challenge and is now drowning in couture (and more credit to the software makers who have kept this unmined treasure in print).

 
5 Star Rating  "The first book of design for all designers"2005-08-15
- Reviewed By markpmcdonald
Design is a difficult process that is often associated more with art than science. With principles of style, concerns about how design works.

While many wring their hands about this, Alexander breaks the problem down, organizes it and then provides a framework for design that is relatively design neutral. That is a feat in deed.

By thinking about how one structures a problem space and the bias that creates -- Alexander give the practioner a powerful tool for setting up the design process and scope. He then goes on to discuss the design process and he makes important distinctions between concious and unconcious design.

Notes on Synthesis and Form are the foundation for Alexander's work on design patterns. This is the must read book before spending time on these other works.

For the practioner, this book provides a powerful and applicable framework for addressing problems in multiple disciplines.
 
5 Star Rating  "A summary"2001-09-14
- Reviewed By wayne-oh
(Below is a series of quotes from the book, some of them slightly modified, plus a small number of "glue" sentences I've added to make transitions smoother. My goal was to distill the key ideas in this exceptional book.)

Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence, i.e., we want to find a good fit.

For a good fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs. If there was good fit at some stage in the past, no matter how removed, it will have persisted, because there is an active stability at work. Tradition and taboo dampen and control the rate of change in an unselfconscious culture's designs.

It is important to understand that the individual person in an unselfconscious culture needs no creative strength. He does not need to be able to improve the form, only to make some sort of change when he notices a failure. The changes may not always be for the better; but it is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process allows only the improvements to persist. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction.

In the unselfconscious process there is no possibility of misconstruing the situation. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind - a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships - and this picture is almost always wrong.

To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context - the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer. A designer who sets out to achieve an adaptive good fit in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his glass-topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange the bits inside correctly. The designer's attempt is hardly as random as the child's is; but the difficulties are the same. His chances of success are small because the number of factors which must fall simultaneously into place is so enormous.

The process of design, even when it has become selfconscious, remains a process of error-reduction. No complex system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time or effort unless the adaptation can proceed component by component, each component relatively independent of the others. The search for the right components, and the right way to build the form up from these components, is the greatest challenge faced by the modern, selfconscious designer. The culmination of the modern designer's task is to make every unit of design both a component and a system. As a component it will fit into the hierarchy of larger components that are above it; as a system it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components of which it itself is made.

 
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