Article

The Determination of Components for an Indian Village

01/01/1963

Book Contribution

Authors:

Christopher Alexander

Published in:

Conference on Design Methods: Papers presented at the Conference on Systematic and Intuitive Methods in Engineering, Industrial Design, Architecture and Communications, pp. 83-114

Editor:

J. Christopher Jones, D. Thornley

Publisher:

Pergamon Press Ltd., Oxford, Oxfordshire, U.K.

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 ...

Published Books

Notes on the Synthesis of Form 01/01/1964

Publication, Original Book

Authors:

Christopher Alexander

Publisher:

Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.

“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 ...

Projects

Master Plan for the Village of Bavra 1962 to 1963

Bavra, near Mehmedabad, Gujarat, India

Master Planning, Designed , Completed in 1963

C.E.S. staff:

Christopher Alexander

Sponsor:

Government of Gujarat, Village Development Planning

Project stages:

Analysis of requirements by hierarchical decomposition Diagrams

An agricultural village of six hundred people, which is to be reorganized to make it fit present and future conditions developing in rural India, is an example for testing a theory of analysis of functions and sythesis of spatial entities. ...

Articles

Reports

Master Plan for Village of Bavra: Village for Gujarat, India 01/01/1962

Project, Project Report

Authors:

Christopher Alexander, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.

81-page report organized in three parts: 1st part describes how the project initiated and the work produced after seven months of field study in the village of Brava, near Mehemedabad, Gujarat; 2nd part includes the 32 pages of a reprinted ...