A pattern language

Houses with smooth hard walls made of prefabricated panels, concrete, gypsum, steel, aluminum, or glass always stay impersonal and dead.

In the world we live in today, newly built houses and apartments are more and more standardized. People no longer have a chance to make them personal and individual. A personal house tells us about the people who live there. A child’s swing hanging in a doorway reflects the attitude of parents to their children. A window seat overlooking a favorite bush supports a contemplative, dreamy nature. Open counters between kitchen and living space are specific to informal family life; small closable hatches between the two are specific to more formal styles. An open shelf around a room should be seen at one height to display a collector’s porcelain, best seen from above; at another height and depth if it is to be used to support a photographer’s latest pictures; at another height again for setting down drinks in the house of a perennial party-giver. A large enough fireplace nook, with enough built-in seats, invites a family of six to sit together.

Each of these things gives us a sense about the people living in the house because each expresses some special personal need. And everyone needs the opportunity to adapt his surroundings to his own way of life.

In traditional societies this personal adaptation came about very easily. People lived in the same place for very long periods,

often for whole lifetimes. And houses were made of hand-processed materials like wood, brick, mud, straw, plaster, which are easily modified by hand by the inhabitants themselves. Under these conditions, the personal character of the houses came about almost automatically from the fact of occupancy.

However, in a modern technological society, neither of these two conditions holds good. People move frequently, and houses are increasingly built of factory-made, factory-finished materials, like 4x8 foot sheets of finished plaster board, aluminum windows, prefabricated baked enamel steel kitchens, glass, concrete, steel—these materials do not lend themselves at all to the gradual modification which personal adaptation requires. Indeed, the processes of mass production are almost directly incompatible with the possibility of personal adaptation.

The crux of the matter lies in the walls. Smooth hard flat industrialized walls make it impossible for people to express their own identity, because most of the identity of a dwelling lies in or near its surfaces—in the 3 or 4 feet near the walls. This is where people keep most of their belongings; this is where special lighting fixtures are; this is where special built-in furniture is placed; this is where the special cosy nooks and corners are that individual family members make their own; this is where the identifiable small-scale variation is; this is the place where people

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can most easily make changes and see the product of their own craftsmanship.

The house will become personal only if the walls are so constructed that each new family can leave its mark on them—they must, in other words, invite incremental fine adjustments, so that the variety of the inhabitants who live in it rubs off on them. And the walls must be so constructed that these fine adjustments are permanent—so that they do accumulate over time and so that the stock of available dwellings becomes progressively more and more differentiated.

All this means that the walls must be extremely deep. To contain shelves, cabinets, displays, special lights, special surfaces, deep window reveals, individual niches, built in seats and nooks, the walls must be at least a foot deep; perhaps even three or four feet deep.

And the walls must be made of some material which is inherently structural—so that however much of it gets carved out, the whole remains rigid and the surface remains continuous almost no matter how much is removed or added.

Then, as time goes on, each family will be able to work the wall surfaces in a very gradual, piecemeal, incremental manner. After a year or two of occupancy, each dwelling will begin to show its own characteristic pattern of niches, bay windows, breakfast nooks, seats built into the walls, shelves, closets, lighting arrangements, sunken parts of the floor, raised parts of the ceiling.

Each house will have a memory; the characteristics and personalities of different human individuals can be written in the thickness of the walls; the houses will become progressively more and more differentiated as they grow older, and the process of personal adaptation—both by choice and by piecemeal modification—has room to breathe. The full version of this pattern was originally published by Christopher Alexander: “Thick Walls,” Architectural Design, July 1968, pp. 324—26.

Therefore:

Open your mind to the possibility that the walls of your building can be thick, can occupy a substantial volume— even actual usable space—and need not be merely thin

buildings

membranes which have no depth. Decide where these thick walls ought to be.

i to 4 feet thick

hand-carveable

Where the thickness is 3 or 4 feet, build the thickness and the volume of the walls according to the process described in thickening the outer walls (211) ; where it is less, a foot or 18 inches, build it from open shelves stretched between deep vertical columns—open shelves (200), columns at the corners (212). Get the detailed position of the various things within the wall from the patterns which define them: window place (180), closets between rooms (198), sunny counter (199), waist

HIGH SHELF (20l), BUILT-IN SEATS (202), CHILD CAVES (2O3), SECRET PLACE (204). . . .

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198 CLOSETS BETWEEN

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ROOMS*

. . . given the layout of rooms, it is now necessary to decide exactly where to put the built-in cupboards and closets. Use them, especially, to help form the enclosure around a workspace—workspace enclosure (183), around a dressing space—dressing room (189), and around the doors of rather private rooms so that the doorway itself gets some depth—corner door (196).

The provision of storage and closets usually comes as an afterthought.

But when they are correctly placed, they can contribute greatly to the layout of the building.

Perhaps the most important secondary feature of storage space is its sound insulating quality. The extra wall sections, and the doors enclosing the closet, as well as the clothes, boxes, and so on, that are being stored, all work to create substantial acoustical barriers. You can take advantage of this feature of closet space by locating all required storage areas within the walls separating rooms rather than in exterior walls, where they cut off natural light.

In addition, when storage is placed in the interior walls of a room, around the doorway, the resulting thickness will make the transitions between rooms and corridors more distinct. For the person entering such a room, the thickness of the wall creates a subtle “entry” space, which makes the room more private. This way of making the closet “thickness” around an entrance is therefore appropriate for spaces like the couple’s realm (136) and the various private rooms—a room of one’s own (141).

Closets form the entrance to the room.

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Therefore:

Mark all the rooms where you want closets. Then place the closets themselves on those interior walls which lie between two rooms and between rooms and passages where you need acoustic insulation. Place them so as to create transition spaces for the doors into the rooms. On no account put closets on exterior walls. It wastes the opportunity for good acoustic insulation and cuts off precious light.

doorways

Later, include the ture—thick walls (

closets as part of the overall building struc-197). . . .

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. . . this pattern helps the gradual evolution of mosaic of subcultures (8), by placing families and work together, and so intensifying the emergence of highly differentiated subcultures, each with its individual character.

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The artificial separation of houses and work creates intolerable rifts in people’s inner lives.

In modern times almost all cities create zones for “work” and other zones for “living” and in most cases enforce the separation by law. Two reasons are given for the separation. First, the work-

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Concentration and segregation of work . . . leads to dead neighborhoods.

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199 SUNNY COUNTER*

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. . . FARMHOUSE KICHEN ( I 39) and COOKING LAYOUT (I 84)

give the overall design of the kitchen, and its workspace, indoor sunlight (128) makes sure of sunshine in the kitchen. But to help create these larger patterns, and to make the kitchen as warm and beautiful as possible, it is worth taking a great deal of care placing the counter and its windows.

Dark gloomy kitchens are depressing. The kitchen needs the sun more than the other rooms, not less.

Look how beautiful the workspace in our main picture is. Nearly the whole counter is lined with windows. The work surface is bathed in light, and there is a sense of spaciousness all around. There is a view out, an air of calm.

A gloomy kitchen.

Compare it with this gloomy kitchen. There is no natural light on the work counter, the cabinets are a clutter; it is a shabby experience to work there—to work below a cabinet, facing a wall with artificial light in the middle of the day.

This gloomy kitchen is typical of many thousands of kitchens in modern houses. It happens for two reasons. First, people often place kitchens to the north, because they reserve the south for living rooms and then put the kitchen in the left over areas. And it happens, secondly, when the kitchen is thought of as

BUILDINGS

an “efficient” place, only meant for the mechanical cooking operations. In many apartments, efficiency kitchens are even in positions where they get no natural light at all. But, of course, the arguments we have presented in farmhouse kitchen (139) for making the kitchen a living room, not merely a machine-shop, change all this.

Therefore:

sun

Place the main part of the kitchen counter on the south and southeast side of the kitchen, with big windows around it, so that sun can flood in and fill the kitchen with yellow light both morning and afternoon.

windows

Give the windows a view toward a garden or the area where children play—windows overlooking life (192). If storage space is tight, you can build open shelves for bowls and plates and plants right across the windows and still let in the sun— open shelves (200). Build the counter as a special part of the room, integral with the building structure, able to take many modifications later—thickening the outer walls (21 i). Use warm colors (250) around the window to soften and warm the sunlight. . . .

200 OPEN SHELVES*

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. . . within the thick walls (197), especially around the

FARMHOUSE KITCHEN ( I 39) and WORKSPACE ENCLOSURE (183), but possibly throughout the building, there is a need for shelves. This pattern helps you decide exactly where you want them and how they shall be organized. Mary Louise Rogers first made the pattern explicit for us.

Cupboards that are too deep waste valuable space, and it always seems that what you want is behind something else.

It is easy to think that you have good storage in a room or in a building just because you have enough closets, cupboards, and shelves. But the value of storage depends as much on the ease of access as on the amount. An enormous amount of cupboard space in a place where no one can get to it is not very useful. It is useful when you can find the things which you have put away at a glance.

This means, essentially, that except for bulk storage (145), things should be stored on open shelves, “one deep.” Then you can see them all. It means, in effect, that you are flattening out the total storage all over the walls—instead of having it in solid lumps, hidden, and hard to reach.

The need for open storage is most obvious in kitchens. In badly planned kitchens, the shelves are filled with things three or four items deep, sometimes stacked on top of each other, and something is always in the way of what you need. But in well-planned kitchens, all storage is one item deep. Shelves are one can deep, glasses are stored one row deep, pots and pans are hung one deep on the wall; for small jars and spices there are special spice shelves that hold the items just one deep.

We think this property is common to all convenient storage. A family’s most prized possessions, gifts, whether for the kitchen or any place else in the house, are hidden away when they arc stored in cupboards and the back shelves of closets. Openly stored, one deep, these things are beautiful around the house.

Ofen shelves across a window.

Many forms of storage can be one-deep: swinging cabinets that have shelves inside tire doors; pegboards for pots and pans; tool racks. It is even possible to create narrow open shelves in front of windows. When things are just one deep, there is still enough light coming in to make the window useful.

Therefore:

Cover the walls with narrow shelves of varying depth but always shallow enough so that things can be placed on them one deep—nothing hiding behind anything else.

one item deep

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•5* ❖

At waist height put in an extra deep shelf for plates, phonograph, TV, boxes, displays, treasures—waist-high shelf (201). Mark the open shelves along with all the other deep spaces in the walls—thickening the outer wall (211). . . .