Julian Street Inn – Shelter for the Homeless: Courtyard fountain with hand-painted and hand-glazed tilework

Design and construction of a shelter for homeless people, to serve 50 to 100 people, on a site of 13,000 sf. The building of 15,000 square feet includes offices, living areas with a dining hall, sleeping rooms, courtyards and gardens. ...

Full-scale paper mock-up of the final tile pattern used for cladding the base of the courtyard fountain, painted with gouache.

Sketch of the tile pattern used for cladding the base wall of the fountain. Diagonally arranged square tiles include four-petal flowers placed on two alternating color backgrounds .

One page with two sketches, one being a schematic perspective view of the courtyard fountain with a lion’s head depicting the water spouting element and a grid of diagonally placed pattern suggesting the tile layout. The second image depicts the ...

Image of test samples of glazed tiles painted and fired for checking on site the color glazes and pattern of the tiles to be used for cladding the fountain curved base in the main courtyard. .

Four color prints on non-photographic paper, depicting an early full scale paper mock-up of the tiles to be used for cladding the fountain curved base in the main courtyard. .

Photograph of fountain with the hand-glazed tiles cladding the fountain base, and the cast concrete lion’s head.

Christopher Alexander recognized the importance of the geometry of centers and for years he was looking for the common structural features among buildings, paintings, streets, carpets, doors, windows, etc. which have "life" and "wholeness". He identified fifteen structural features which ...

Ornament arises as part of the design process, when a person is making and seeks to embellish this "something" while making it. It arises as a result of the latent centers in the uncompleted thing requiring still more centers, requiring ...

A building can only amount to something as a living thing when the various physical elements which appear in it are profound centers. The dominant feature of the process that is working correctly is that new centers are formed, and ...

“A Vision of a Living World”, the third volume of “The Nature of Order” series, presents, for the first time, a full spectrum of Alexander’s and CES built and unbuilt works. The book describes hundreds of buildings, plans, neighborhoods, drawings, ...