Design Your Own Sustainable Home, Office or Community Building Using PatternLanguage.com

By Judy Ostrow
Published on July 1, 2003
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Photo by Randy Schmidt
This home and its room-like garden terraces form one seamless whole, reflecting the pattern “Outdoor Room.”

Website:PatternLanguage.com

Access: A monthly $5 membership fee is required to access the entire website (a portion is available for free).

Founders: Architect Christopher Alexander and his associates at the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley, California.

Mission Statement: Allow homeowners and designers to explore all 253 definable qualities in the built environment, as introduced in A Pattern Language (Oxford University Press, 1977), plus a wide variety of sequences that unfold the design/build process.

Highlights: Projects great and small–from village green to family home to office–are presented in a series of steps that illuminate functional and aesthetic attributes as well as seamless integration with the surrounding environment and the people who inhabit them.

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