Download or read book Notes on the Synthesis of Form written by Christopher Alexander and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1964 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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 only if it proceeds piecemeal instead of all at once. It is for this reason that forms from traditional un-self-conscious cultures, molded not by designers but by the slow pattern of changes within tradition, are so beautifully organized and adapted. When the designer, in our own self-conscious culture, is called on to create a form that is adapted to its context he is unsuccessful, because the preconceived categories out of which he builds his picture of the problem do not correspond to the inherent components of the problem, and therefore lead only to the arbitrariness, willfulness, and lack of understanding which plague the design of modern buildings and modern cities. In the second part, Mr. Alexander presents a method by which the designer may bring his full creative imagination into play, and yet avoid the traps of irrelevant preconception. He shows that, whenever a problem is stated, it is possible to ignore existing concepts and to create new concepts, out of the structure of the problem itself, which do correspond correctly to what he calls the subsystems of the adaptive process. By treating each of these subsystems as a separate subproblem, the designer can translate the new concepts into form. The form, because of the process, will be well-adapted to its context, non-arbitrary, and correct. The mathematics underlying this method, based mainly on set theory, is fully developed in a long appendix. Another appendix demonstrates the application of the method to the design of an Indian village.
Download or read book A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.
Download or read book A New Theory of Urban Design written by Christopher Alexander and published by Center for Environmental Struc. This book was released on 1987 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The venerable cities of the past, such as Venice or Amsterdam, convey a feeling of wholeness, an organic unity that surfaces in every detail, large and small, in restaurants, shops, public gardens, even in balconies and ornaments. But this sense of wholeness is lacking in modern urban design, with architects absorbed in problems of individual structures, and city planners preoccupied with local ordinances, it is almost impossible to achieve. In this groundbreaking volume, architect and planner Christopher Alexander presents a new theory of urban design which attempts to recapture the process by which cities develop organically. To discover the kinds of laws needed to create a growing whole in a city, Alexander proposes here a preliminary set of seven rules which embody the process at a practical level and which are consistent with the day-to-day demands of urban development. He then puts these rules to the test, setting out with a number of his graduate students to simulate the urban redesign of a high-density part of San Francisco, initiating a project that encompassed some ninety different design problems, including warehouses, hotels, fishing piers, a music hall, and a public square. This extensive experiment is documented project by project, with detailed discussion of how each project satisfied the seven rules, accompanied by floorplans, elevations, street grids, axonometric diagrams and photographs of the scaled-down model which clearly illustrate the discussion. A New Theory of Urban Design provides an entirely new theoretical framework for the discussion of urban problems, one that goes far to remedy the defects which cities have today.
Download or read book The Oregon Experiment written by Christopher Alexander and published by Center for Environmental Struc. This book was released on 1975 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on a plan for an extension to the University of Oregon, this book shows how any community the size of a university or small town might go about designing its own future environment with all members of the community participating personally or by representation. It is a brilliantcompanion volume to A Pattern Language.
Download or read book The Production of Houses written by Christopher Alexander and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an innovative thinker about building and planning, Christopher Alexander has attracted a devoted following. His seminal books--The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, and The Oregon Experiment--defined a radical and fundamently new process of environmental design. Alexander now gives us the latest book in his series--a book that puts his theories to the test and shows what sort of production system can create the kind of environment he has envisioned. The Production of Houses centers around a group of buildings which Alexander and his associates built in 1976 in northern Mexico. Each house is different and the book explains how each family helped to lay out and construct its own home according to the family's own needs and in the framework of the pattern language. Numerous diagrams and tables as well as a variety of anecdotes make the day-today process clear. The Mexican project, however, is only the starting point for a comprehensive theory of housing production. The Production of Houses describes seven principles which apply to any system of production in any part of the world for housing of any cost in any climate or culture or at any density. In the last part of the book, "The Shift of Paradigm," Alexander describes, in detail, the devastating nature of the revolution in world view which is contained in his proposal for housing construction, and its overall implications for deep-seated cultural change.
Download or read book Community and Privacy written by Serge Chermayeff and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth written by Christopher Alexander and published by . This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christoper Alexander's always controversial work raises issues critical to regenerating the environment and creating a new culture for building--and rebuilding--our cities, neighborhoods, buildings, and gardens. Demonstrates the application of Alexander's theories and methods to a large-scale project and shows how architecture can bring life to a community. The creative processes described in the book are for anyone who designs, builds, shapes, repairs, or otherwise modifies the built environment.
Download or read book Structure and Synthesis written by Mark Fell and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of pioneer sound artist Mark Fell's work charting his defiantly unorthodox thinking on time, structure, technology, and the relation between academic and popular electronic music. In this extensive anthology, Mark Fell, a pioneering artist known for his sound installations and his musical work solo and as part of SND and Sensate Focus, assembles a collection of diverse materials charting his defiantly unorthodox thinking on time, structure, technology, and the relation between academic and popular electronic music. An amalgam of workbook and manifesto, featuring a collection of interleaved statements, diagrammatic scores, and instructional texts, Structure and Synthesis is a direct engagement with Fell's original thinking and his continual provocations in regard to "experimental" music. Alongside reflections on theory and practice, the volume includes exercises for dismantling musical expertise, habits, and intuitions, documenting Fell's explorations of the peripheries of rhythm, shape, and time in perception and performance. Long-term collaborator designer Joe Gilmore provides a striking graphic context for Fell's evolving thinking and the methods and structures he has developed through his solo and collaborative work.
Download or read book Nanoparticles written by American Chemical Society. Meeting and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book summarizes recent advances in methods to synthesize, stabilize, passivate and functionalize diverse nanoparticles from metals, metal oxides, semiconductors, polymers, organics and biomolecules. A wide range of potential appplications with nanoparticles as building blocks are described.
Download or read book Design for a Living Planet written by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros and published by Sustasis Press. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brief, accessible volume, the authors — an urban philosopher and a mathematician-physicist — explain the surprising new findings from the sciences that are beginning to transform environmental design in the modern era. Authors Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros explore fractals, networks, self-organization, dynamical systems and other revolutionary ideas, describing them to non-science readers in a direct and engaging way. The book also examines fascinating new topics of design, including Agile, Wiki, Design Patterns and other “open-source” approaches from the software world. The authors conclude that a profound transformation is under way in modern design — and today’s students and practitioners will need to be aware of its implications for our future. “Lucidly describes what’s coming in the world of design — and what needs to come.” — Ward Cunningham, Inventor of wiki, and pioneer of Pattern Languages of Programming, Agile, and Scrum “Essential reading for all urban designers.” — Jeff Speck, Author of Walkable City “Brilliant.” — Charles Montgomery, Author of Happy City “Inspired, compelling and fascinating… Recognizes that a true architecture can be dug from the facts, insights, and theories, that occur with a broadening of science to include the human being.” — Christopher Alexander, Author of A Pattern Language and Notes on the Synthesis of Form Some comments on the individual chapters: “Packed with detail and beautiful in presentation.” — Gil Friend “Human society must find a path of retreat. Salingaros and Mehaffy point the way.” — David Brussat, Providence Journal “Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros have written some brilliant articles on how we can co-create cities which are truly resilient, rather than being ‘engineered resilient’.” — Smallworld Urbanism “For me, this essay was like a flash of insight, and I suddenly saw the world in a new light.” — Oeyvind Holmstad, Permaliv “We’ve just come across a very thoughtful article by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros… [who] draw a number of lessons from biological systems and use them to draw conclusions about how resilient human systems must be designed.” — Resilient Design Institute “Salingaros and Mehaffy take us from the configuration of city spaces to the order of cells in living beings.” — Jaap Dawson, Delft Institute of Technology “If you wanted to know where the cutting edge was in urban design, it is here.” — Patrick J. Kennedy, CarFreeInBigD “This is the single most intelligent and illuminating article I’ve seen on Archdaily in 3 years.” — Nìming Pínglùn Zhě, China Michael Mehaffy is an urbanist and design theorist, and a periodic visiting professor or adjunct in five graduate universities in four countries and three disciplines (architecture, urban planning and philosophy) including the University of Oregon (US) and the University of Strathclyde (UK). He has been a close associate of the architect and software pioneer Christopher Alexander, and a Research Associate with the Center for Environmental Structure, Alexander’s research center founded in 1967. He is currently executive director of Portland, Oregon based Sustasis Foundation, and editor of Sustasis Press. Nikos A. Salingaros is a mathematician and polymath known for his work on urban theory, architectural theory, complexity theory, and design philosophy. He has been a close collaborator of the architect and computer software pioneer Christopher Alexander. Salingaros published substantive research on Algebras, Mathematical Physics, Electromagnetic Fields, and Thermonuclear Fusion before turning his attention to Architecture and Urbanism. He is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio and has been on the Architecture faculties of universities in Italy, Mexico, and The Netherlands.
Download or read book The Nature of Order The phenomenon of life written by Christopher Alexander and published by Nature of Order. This book was released on 2002 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Book Oneof this four-volume work, Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture. He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years. This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.
Download or read book The Book Thief written by Markus Zusak and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME The extraordinary, beloved novel about the ability of books to feed the soul even in the darkest of times. When Death has a story to tell, you listen. It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meager existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbors during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement. In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New York Times “Deserves a place on the same shelf with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.” —USA Today DON’T MISS BRIDGE OF CLAY, MARKUS ZUSAK’S FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE BOOK THIEF.
Download or read book Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining written by Bing Liu and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language. It is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing and is also widely studied in data mining, Web mining, and text mining. In fact, this research has spread outside of computer science to the management sciences and social sciences due to its importance to business and society as a whole. The growing importance of sentiment analysis coincides with the growth of social media such as reviews, forum discussions, blogs, micro-blogs, Twitter, and social networks. For the first time in human history, we now have a huge volume of opinionated data recorded in digital form for analysis. Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and social domain because opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality, and the choices we make, are largely conditioned on how others see and evaluate the world. For this reason, when we need to make a decision we often seek out the opinions of others. This is true not only for individuals but also for organizations. This book is a comprehensive introductory and survey text. It covers all important topics and the latest developments in the field with over 400 references. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners who are interested in social media analysis in general and sentiment analysis in particular. Lecturers can readily use it in class for courses on natural language processing, social media analysis, text mining, and data mining. Lecture slides are also available online. Table of Contents: Preface / Sentiment Analysis: A Fascinating Problem / The Problem of Sentiment Analysis / Document Sentiment Classification / Sentence Subjectivity and Sentiment Classification / Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis / Sentiment Lexicon Generation / Opinion Summarization / Analysis of Comparative Opinions / Opinion Search and Retrieval / Opinion Spam Detection / Quality of Reviews / Concluding Remarks / Bibliography / Author Biography
Download or read book Molecular Biology of The Cell written by Bruce Alberts and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Basic Neurochemistry written by Scott Brady and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2011-11-02 with total page 1120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Basic Neurochemistry: Principles of Molecular, Cellular, and Medical Neurobiology, the outstanding and comprehensive classic text on neurochemistry, is now newly updated and revised in its Eighth Edition. For more than forty years, this text has been the worldwide standard for information on the biochemistry of the nervous system, serving as a resource for postgraduate trainees and teachers in neurology, psychiatry, and basic neuroscience, as well as for medical, graduate, and postgraduate students and instructors in the neurosciences. The text has evolved, as intended, with the science. It is also an excellent source of current information on basic biochemical and cellular processes in brain function and neurological diseases for continuing medical education and qualifying examinations. This text continues to be the standard reference and textbook for exploring the translational nature of neuroscience, bringing basic and clinical neuroscience together in one authoritative volume. Our book title reflects the expanded attention to these links between neurochemistry and neurologic disease. This new edition continues to cover the basics of neurochemistry as in the earlier editions, along with expanded and additional coverage of new research from: Intracellular trafficking; Stem cells, adult neurogenesis, regeneration; Lipid messengers; Expanded coverage of all major neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders; Neurochemistry of addiction; Neurochemistry of pain; Neurochemistry of hearing and balance; Neurobiology of learning and memory; Sleep; Myelin structure, development, and disease; Autism; and Neuroimmunology. Completely updated text with new authors and material, and many entirely new chapters Over 400 fully revised figures in splendid color 61 chapters covering the range of cellular, molecular and medical neuroscience Translational science boxes emphasizing the connections between basic and clinical neuroscience Companion website at http://elsevierdirect.com/companions/9780123749475
Download or read book Truth Is a Synthesis Catholic Dogmatic Theology written by Mauro Gagliardi and published by Emmaus Academic. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 804 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In everyday parlance, synthesis is synonymous with short. Here, Mauro Gagliardi uses synthesis as it has been applied to the Hypostatic Union in Christ: the “Synthetic Union” of the two natures in one Person. All of dogmatic theology is presented from this et-et (both-and), Christocentric approach in Truth is a Synthesis: Catholic Dogmatic Theology. The volume presents for beginners a comprehensive, organic view of the Catholic faith. Truth is a Synthesis spotlights, in a respectful yet clear way, the different views about Christian Dogmatics held by our separated brethren, both Protestant and Orthodox. As he explores the implications of the et-et nature of theology, Gagliardi reveals the underlying unity of both Fundamental and Dogmatic theology “Professor Gagliardi’s book is in every way a magnum opus, both from the qualitative and the quantitative standpoint.”—Cardinal Gerhard L. Müller
Download or read book Pattern Theory written by Helmut Leitner and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book "Pattern Theory" summarizes the work of an important contemporary thinker, the architect and systems theorist Christopher Alexander, an emeritus professor at the University of Berkeley, California. In 1979 one of his books, "A Pattern Language", an 1100-page-essay on architecture and human life, became a non-fiction best seller that attracted half a million readers and continues to inspire people from many disciplines. The still broader four-volume essay "The Nature of Order" was published 2002-2004 as magnum opus. The life work of Alexander is outstanding. He develops a general theory of living systems, a systems theory based on the concepts center, wholeness and transformation by using design patterns and pattern languages as parts of the method. There is a whole new cosmos of thinking with astonishing bandwidth: Alexander suggests a new scientific paradigm that stands in opposition to the traditional causal mechanistic paradigm of natural science - and he offers a new knowledge format as a way to enable people and support their participation in design processes.Alexander's theories have already proven useful in education, organizational development, permaculture, and in software the design patterns have even become mainstream. Many disciplines are about to follow in this development. Pattern theory allows us to change our thinking, to rethink our world and to move towards a fairer society. This leads to more participation and higher sustainability. Alexander's concepts form a mental toolbox for societal change and innovation.
