Ruth's Reviews > A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction

The authors of this book, architects and designers, believed that they had identified design issues that were timeless. They did the research and writing for the book between about 1968 and 1977. I think many of their solutions, and even some of the problems they identified, were dated by the time the book was published. I read the essays in the book out of order, which was interesting--sort of like choosing your own adventure. That, and the unwieldy nature of their arguments, made it difficult to figure out how to summarize what the book means to me. It's a beautiful and idealistic book that envisions a society where people build to give everyone what they need.

These authors were among many people who believed that the only way to ensure that communities reflect the people who live in them is home ownership. They did not address questions of affordability of housing. Furthermore, as they began their project in 1968, they believed that the problem of racism in housing was over. After all, they'd seen the passage of the Fair Housing Act. They even dismissed racism as an issue in one essay, while discussing the formation of neighborhoods by affinity. These massive oversights or innocence or whatever it was, make reading this book almost unbearable. Another thing which made the book feel dated, to me, were all the ways that the authors tried to deal with the generation gap and the family. I cannot imagine how people who had traveled to many cultures and cities could think of their emphasis on the normalcy and centrality of the nuclear family and in particular the needs of couples were universal.

The other piece of reading this book that saddened me were all the insights about low rise buildings, the importance of public space, and the need for people to have space to play. Every positive thing in this book has either been ignored in urban planning--to the extent we actually allow urban planners to plan spaces--or made available to affluent people only. I think the saddest thing was seeing recently that people are building mini-houses in parking lots. This decades after this book came out and was read by everyone--this book that asserts that only a minimal amount of space in a city should go to parking, and how important it is for every house to have a garden.

Anyway--fun to read, if bittersweet.