“The City is a Semi-Lattice, but not a Tree”: Original text of article “A City is not a Tree”

01/01/1964

Article Publication, Original Text

Original 37-page text of the famous article, a milestone in the development of Alexander’s theory on design, possibly presented in a lecture before being published; at the bottom of the first page it reads “with thanks to Harris Savin for many conversations”.

Authors:

Christopher Alexander, University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design, Department of Architecture, Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.

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Content of

Article

A City is not a Tree Part 1 01/04/1965

Article

Authors:

Christopher Alexander

Published in:

Architectural Forum, Vol. 122, No. 1, pp. 58-62

Publisher:

Urban America Inc., New York, NY, U.S.A.

References

Scientific Research

Good Fit between Form & Context

Areas of focus:

Quality and Values

Guiding idea:

Goodness of Fit

Christopher Alexander states in the "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" that the object of design is form, and consequently the problem of design is to fit the form with its context. Form is the part of the world which ...
Decomposition Process and the Diagrams

Areas of focus:

Structure of Space

Guiding idea:

Early Mathematical Approach

The prevailing idea being the search for goodness of fit between form and its context, Alexander postulated that in today's selfconscious design process, in order to attain a good design there must be an underlying correspondence between the structure of ...