The Production of Houses

Christopher Alexander's seminal books - The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, The Oregon Experiment, and The Linz Cafe - defined a radical and fundamentally new process of environmental design. This new book in the series puts Alexander's theories to the test and shows what sort of production system can create the kind of environment Alexander has envisioned.

This book 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-to-day process clear.

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. 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 implication for deep-seated cultural change.