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Notes On The Synthesis Of Form
''Notes on the Synthesis of Form'' is a book by Christopher Alexander about the process of design. Design Alexander defines design as "the process of inventing things which display new physical order, organization, form, in response to function...". Even though his focus was formed in architectural design and civil engineering, the core ideas underlying his approach can be applied to many other fields. Alexander's analysis of the village of Bavra, in Gujarat, India formed the major case study in the dissertation and the book. Influence By the time it was published, the book was considered "one of the most important contemporary books about the art of design, what it is, and how to go about it." The book influenced a number of leading software writers, including Larry Constantine, Ed Yourdon, Alan Cooper, and Tom DeMarco. Alexander's later work For some reasons – perhaps related to the mathematical difficulties he faced or to the paradigm shift taking place in the design met ...
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Christopher Alexander
Christopher Wolfgang John Alexander (4 October 1936 – 17 March 2022) was an Austrian-born British-American architect and Design theory, design theorist. He was an Professors in the United States#Professor emeritus and emerita, emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His theories about the nature of human-centered design have affected fields beyond architecture, including urban design, software design, and sociology. Alexander designed and personally built over 100 buildings, both as an architect and a general contractor. In software, Alexander is regarded as the father of the pattern language movement. According to creator Ward Cunningham, the first wiki—the technology behind Wikipedia—led directly from Alexander's work. Alexander's work has also influenced the development of agile software development. In architecture, Alexander's work is used by a number of different contemporary architectural communities of practice, including the New Urbanist mov ...
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Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press (HUP) is an academic publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University. It is a member of the Association of University Presses. Its director since 2017 is George Andreou. The press maintains offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard Square, and in London, England. The press co-founded the distributor TriLiteral LLC with MIT Press and Yale University Press. TriLiteral was sold to LSC Communications in 2018. Notable authors published by HUP include Eudora Welty, Walter Benjamin, E. O. Wilson, John Rawls, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Jay Gould, Helen Vendler, Carol Gilligan, Amartya Sen, David Blight, Martha Nussbaum, and Thomas Piketty. The Display Room in Harvard Square, dedicated to selling HUP publications, closed on June 17, 2009. Related publishers, imprints, and series HUP owns the Belknap Press imprint (trade name), imprint, which it inaugurated in May 1954 with the publication of the ''Harvard Guide to ...
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Architecture
Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructing buildings or other Structure#Load-bearing, structures. The term comes ; ; . Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural symbols and as work of art, works of art. Historical civilizations are often identified with their surviving architectural achievements. The practice, which began in the Prehistory, prehistoric era, has been used as a way of expressing culture by civilizations on all seven continents. For this reason, architecture is considered to be a form of art. Texts on architecture have been written since ancient times. The earliest surviving text on architectural theory, architectural theories is the 1st century AD treatise by the Roman architect Vitruvius, according to whom a good bui ...
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Building Design
Building design, also called architectural design, refers to the broadly based architectural, engineering and technical applications to the design of buildings. All building projects require the services of a building designer, typically a licensed architect. Smaller, less complicated projects often do not require a licensed professional, and the design of such projects is often undertaken by building designers, draftspersons, interior designers (for interior fit-outs or renovations), or contractors. Larger, more complex building projects require the services of many professionals trained in specialist disciplines, usually coordinated by an architect. Occupations Architect An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and supervision of the construction of buildings. Professionally, an architect's decisions affect public safety, and thus an architect must undergo specialized training consisting of advanced education and a practicum (or internship) for practical e ...
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Civil Engineering
Civil engineering is a regulation and licensure in engineering, professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including public works such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewage systems, pipelines, structural element, structural components of buildings, and railways. Civil engineering is traditionally broken into a number of sub-disciplines. It is considered the second-oldest engineering discipline after military engineering, and it is defined to distinguish non-military engineering from military engineering. Civil engineering can take place in the public sector from municipal public works departments through to federal government agencies, and in the private sector from locally based firms to Fortune Global 500, ''Fortune'' Global 500 companies. History Civil engineering as a discipline Civil engineering is the application of physical and scientific principles for solv ...
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Larry Constantine
Larry LeRoy Constantine (born 1943) is an American software engineer, professor in the Center for Exact Sciences and Engineering at the University of Madeira Portugal, and considered one of the pioneers of computing. He has contributed numerous concepts and techniques forming the foundations of modern practice in software engineering and applications design and development. Biography Constantine grew up in Anoka, Minnesota, and graduated from Anoka High School in 1961 after being active in debate and thespians as well as other extra curricular activities. He was named "Most Likely to Succeed" by his classmates. Constantine received an S.B. in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1967 with a specialization in information systems and psychology. He received a certificate in family therapy 1973 from the Boston Family Institute, two-year post graduate training program.
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Edward Yourdon
Edward Nash Yourdon (April 30, 1944 – January 20, 2016) was an American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and software engineering methodology pioneer. He was one of the lead developers of the structured analysis techniques of the 1970s and a co-developer of both the Yourdon/Whitehead method for object-oriented analysis/design in the late 1980s and the Coad/Yourdon methodology for object-oriented analysis/design in the 1990s. Biography Yourdon obtained his B.S. in applied mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1965, and did graduate work in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and the Polytechnic Institute of New York. In 1964 Yourdon started working at Digital Equipment Corporation developing FORTRAN programs for the PDP-5 minicomputer and later assembler for the PDP-8. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked at a small consulting firm and as an independent consultant. In 1974 Yourdon founded his ow ...
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Alan Cooper (software Designer)
Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952) is an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the "Father of Visual Basic", Cooper is also known for his books ''About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design'' and ''The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity''. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products. On April 28, 2017, Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows "for his invention of the visual development environment in Visual BASIC, and for his pioneering work in establishing the field of interaction design and its fundamental tools." Biography Early life Alan Cooper grew up in Marin County, California, United States, where he attended the College of Marin, studying architecture. He learned programming and ...
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Tom DeMarco
Tom DeMarco (born August 20, 1940) is an American software engineer, author, and consultant on software engineering topics. He was an early developer of structured analysis in the 1970s. Early life and education Tom DeMarco was born in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. He received a BSEE degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University, a M.S. from Columbia University, and a diplôme from the University of Paris. Career DeMarco started working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1963, where he participated in ESS-1 project to develop the first large scale Electronic Switching System, which became installed in telephone offices all over the world.Tom DeMarco (2002Structured Analysis: Beginnings of a New Discipline In: ''sd&m Conference 2001, Software Pioneers'' Eds.: M. Broy, E. Denert, Springer 2002. Later in the 1960s he started working for a French IT consulting firm, where he worked on the development of a conveyor system for the new merchandise mart at La Villette in Pa ...
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Patterns
A pattern is a regularity in the world, in human-made design, or in abstract ideas. As such, the elements of a pattern repeat in a predictable manner. A geometric pattern is a kind of pattern formed of geometric shapes and typically repeated like a wallpaper design. Any of the senses may directly observe patterns. Conversely, abstract patterns in science, mathematics, or language may be observable only by analysis. Direct observation in practice means seeing visual patterns, which are widespread in nature and in art. Visual patterns in nature are often chaotic, rarely exactly repeating, and often involve fractals. Natural patterns include spirals, meanders, waves, foams, tilings, cracks, and those created by symmetries of rotation and reflection. Patterns have an underlying mathematical structure; indeed, mathematics can be seen as the search for regularities, and the output of any function is a mathematical pattern. Similarly in the sciences, theories explain and predict re ...
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A Pattern Language
''A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction'' is a 1977 book on architecture, urban design, and community livability. It was authored by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure of Berkeley, California, with writing credits also to Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. Decades after its publication, it is still one of the best-selling books on architecture. The book creates a new language, what the authors call a pattern language derived from timeless entities called patterns. As they write on page xxxv of the introduction, "All 253 patterns together form a language." Patterns describe a problem and then offer a solution. In doing so the authors intend to give ordinary people, not only professionals, a way to work with their neighbors to improve a town or neighborhood, design a house for themselves or work with colleagues to design an office, workshop, or public building such as a school. St ...
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Sara Ishikawa
Sara Ishikawa is an architect and academic specializing in people-space relationships. She is a professor emerita at the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley. She is co-author of ''A Pattern Language, The Oregon Experiment ''The Oregon Experiment'' is a 1975 book by Christopher Alexander and collaborators Murray Silverstein, Shlomo Angel, Sara Ishikawa, and Denny Abrams. It describes an experimental approach to campus community planning at the University of Oreg ...'' and ''Houses Generated By Patterns.'' She earned her Bachelor of Architecture degree from University of California, Berkeley. References Living people American women architects 1930s births UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design faculty American academics of Japanese descent American women academics UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design alumni 21st-century American women {{US-academic-bio-stub ...
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