Reddit Reddit reviews The Timeless Way of Building

We found 13 Reddit comments about The Timeless Way of Building. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Timeless Way of Building
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13 Reddit comments about The Timeless Way of Building:

u/soapdealer · 55 pointsr/SimCity

I totally love the Christopher Alexander books. Definitely check out his The Timeless Way of Building which is a great companion piece to A Pattern Language. You should know that his works, while great in my opinion, are sort of considered idiosyncratic and not really in the mainstream of architecture/urban design.

Here's a short reading list you should look at:

The Smart Growth Manual and Suburban Nation by Andres Duany & Jeff Speck. Another set of sort-of-companion works, the Manual has a concrete set of recommendations inspired by the critique of modern town planning in Suburban Nation and might be more useful for your purposes.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs is probably the most famous and influential book on city planning ever and contains a lot of really original and thoughtful insights on cities. Despite being over half-a-century old it feels very contemporary and relevant.

The Geography of Nowhere by James Howard Kunstler is similarly mostly a critique of modernist planning principles but is both short and very well written so I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Makeshift Metropolis by Witold Rybczynski: I can't recommend this entire book, but it does contain (in my opinion) the best summary of the history of American urban planning. Really useful for a historical perspective on different schools of thought in city design over the years.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup is the book on parking policy. It's huge (700+ pages) and very thorough and academic, so it might be harder to get through than the other, more popular-audience-oriented titles on the list, but if you want to include parking as a gameplay element, I really can't recommend it highly enough. It's a problem that's thorny enough most city games just ignore it entirely: Simcity2013's developers say they abandoned it after realizing it would mean most of their players' cities would be covered in parking lots, ignoring that most actual American cities are indeed covered in parking lots.

Finally there's a bunch of great blogs/websites out there you should check out: Streetsblog is definitely a giant in transportation/design blogging and has a really capable team of journalists and a staggering amount of content. Chuck Marohn's Strong Towns blog and Podcast are a great source for thinking about these issues more in terms of smaller towns and municipalities (in contrast to Streetsblog's focus on major metropolitan areas). The Sightline Daily's blog does amazing planning/transpo coverage of the Pacific Northwest. Finally [The Atlantic Cities] (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/) blog has incredible coverage on city-issues around the world.

I hope this was helpful and not overwhelming. It's a pretty big (and in my opinion, interesting) topic, so there's a lot of ground to cover even in an introductory sense.

u/sstadnicki · 15 pointsr/gamedev

I'd add The Timeless Way of Building ( www.amazon.com/dp/0195024028 ) to this list, especially for level design purposes - not only does it provide a fairly gentle introduction to the notion of design patterns, it's also a great way of understanding some of the specifics behind how architecture affects people emotionally and how particular building patterns evoke particular moods.

u/ultimape · 13 pointsr/TalesFromRetail

I was looking into being an architect before I got into Computer Engineering. It is very surprising how universal interaction design is.

The psychology of how humans work is just as useful in designing floorplans as it is in designing websites.

In Computer Science, the idea of "design patterns" actually originated from the writings of a building architect: http://www.amazon.com/The-Timeless-Building-Christopher-Alexander/dp/0195024028

u/astro · 3 pointsr/compsci

The Timeless Way of Building

This book, and the teachings of the author, is often cited as the inspiration for Design Patterns. I love this book. It's a great book on design in general, and reading it sheds light on how Design Patterns are best understood.

u/DrFriendless · 2 pointsr/DesirePath
u/SlappysRevenge · 2 pointsr/architecture

I'm coming from a game design perspective rather than architect, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've been told (numerous times) to check out the work Christopher Alexander, particularly A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building.

I haven't read either one yet, but they are at the top of my "To Read" list.

u/jfb3 · 2 pointsr/books
u/CSMastermind · 2 pointsr/AskComputerScience

Senior Level Software Engineer Reading List


Read This First


  1. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment

    Fundamentals


  2. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
  3. Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions
  4. Enterprise Patterns and MDA: Building Better Software with Archetype Patterns and UML
  5. Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
  6. Rework
  7. Writing Secure Code
  8. Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries

    Development Theory


  9. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
  10. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications
  11. Introduction to Functional Programming
  12. Design Concepts in Programming Languages
  13. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective
  14. Modern Operating Systems
  15. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
  16. The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
  17. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

    Philosophy of Programming


  18. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
  19. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
  20. The Elements of Programming Style
  21. A Discipline of Programming
  22. The Practice of Programming
  23. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
  24. Object Thinking
  25. How to Solve It by Computer
  26. 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

    Mentality


  27. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
  28. The Intentional Stance
  29. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine
  30. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
  31. The Timeless Way of Building
  32. The Soul Of A New Machine
  33. WIZARDRY COMPILED
  34. YOUTH
  35. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

    Software Engineering Skill Sets


  36. Software Tools
  37. UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
  38. Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development
  39. Practical Parallel Programming
  40. Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computer Systems
  41. Mastering Regular Expressions
  42. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
  43. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C
  44. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
  45. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
  46. SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
  47. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques
  48. Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems Using Java, Python, and more.

    Design


  49. The Psychology Of Everyday Things
  50. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
  51. Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
  52. The Non-Designer's Design Book

    History


  53. Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
  54. Death March
  55. Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
  56. The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
  57. The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad
  58. In the Beginning...was the Command Line

    Specialist Skills


  59. The Art of UNIX Programming
  60. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
  61. Programming Windows
  62. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
  63. Starting Forth: An Introduction to the Forth Language and Operating System for Beginners and Professionals
  64. lex & yacc
  65. The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference
  66. C Programming Language
  67. No Bugs!: Delivering Error Free Code in C and C++
  68. Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied
  69. Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
  70. Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit

    DevOps Reading List


  71. Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart
  72. The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services
  73. The Practice of System and Network Administration: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT
  74. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
  75. DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective
  76. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
  77. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
  78. Cloud Native Java: Designing Resilient Systems with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry
  79. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
  80. Migrating Large-Scale Services to the Cloud
u/BlinkingWolf · 1 pointr/tipofmytongue

Found it! The Timeless Way Of Building was what I was looking for. Other interesting suggestions were A Pattern Language and The Design Of Everyday Things

SOLVED

u/WizardNinjaPirate · 1 pointr/architecture

A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building



The Designer Eye


How Buildings Learn


Thermal Delight In Architecture


These last ones may not exactly be what you are looking for but they go into the architectural aspects of specific types of architecture, japanese, malaysia and so I think are pretty interesting in that they show how specific types of houses work.

The Malay House


Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings


A Place of My Own