Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Harvard Paperbacks)

(Below is a series of quotes from the book, some of them slightly modified, plus a small number of "glue" sentences I've added to make transitions smoother. My goal was to distill the key ideas in this exceptional book.)Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence, i.e., we want to find a good fit.For a good fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs. If there was good fit at some stage in the past, no matter how removed, it will have persisted, because there is an active stability at work. Tradition and taboo dampen and control the rate of change in an unselfconscious culture's designs.It is important to understand that the individual person in an unselfconscious culture needs no creative strength. He does not need to be able to improve the form, only to make some sort of change when he notices a failure. The changes may not always be for the better; but it is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process allows only the improvements to persist. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction.In the unselfconscious process there is no possibility of misconstruing the situation. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind - a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships - and this picture is always incomplete and sometimes wrong.To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context - the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer. A designer who sets out to achieve an adaptive good fit in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his glass-topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange the bits inside correctly. The designer's attempt is hardly as random as the child's is; but the difficulties are the same. His chances of success are small because the number of factors which must fall simultaneously into place is so enormous.The process of design, even when it has become selfconscious, remains a process of error-reduction. No complex system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time or effort unless the adaptation can proceed component by component, each component relatively independent of the others. The search for the right components, and the right way to build the form up from these components, is the greatest challenge faced by the modern, selfconscious designer. The culmination of the modern designer's task is to make every unit of design both a component and a system. As a component it will fit into the hierarchy of larger components that are above it; as a system it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components of which it itself is made.

A deep and nuanced analysis of patterns in design failures and successes - the author clearly has astounding comprehension of the modern design situation. I found the "unselfconscious design" vs "selfconscious design" analysis fascinating (although to be politically correct it should be something like "self designer" and "delegated designer" instead). The determination and use of (relatively) independent sub-systems to prune the overall design space is profound.Part 2 (chapter 6, page 73) is a highly structured "program" for design. I found this section of the book much less compelling, and I'm not sure how it necessarily falls out from Part 1. For me, Alexander's biggest insight is that a good design process involves iterative periods of change and stasis - specifically, designing by modifying single (or small numbers of) factors individually and allowing the design to reach "equilibrium" before making additional changes. From this standpoint, designing a whole village at the beginning (as is started in appendix I) may not ever be a good design approach - even with Alexander's "program"

Anyone who designs things --even little things like where to put the chair by the bed, or slightly larger things like a skyscraper or the internet-- should read this book. It's architecture: the thought processes of moving through the phases of panic/ignorance to discovery/fascination to the magical moment when your design begins to talk back to you, and tell where YOU need to go, and when you've made a mistake, Or when your design shows you a brilliant idea that never would have occurred to you.I've designed little tools, rooms, houses, musical instruments and gigantic computer networks. It's scary.There are virtually no books on the joys and angst of the design thought process, so this book is priceless. Peripherally related are Malraux's "Voices of Silence" and Jacques Maritain's "Creative Intuition In Art And Poetry", both about thought processes/aesthetics across multiple disciplines.. Don Norman's "The psychology Of Everyday Things" is a wonderful exploration of the gut-level design disasters we all deal with all the time. Bottom line: IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT.

An excellent book that will change the way I describe things forever.

After reading this book, I went back to read the amazon reviews, and was rather confused. This book has a very narrow focus, and is not targeted at the typical person reading about design. Other reviews seem to suggest that this is a good book for people interested in design, but to put a different angle on it, it reads much more like a theoretical dissertation than a book on design.Unless that is what you are looking for, pass on this book. Unfortunately, I was forced to give this two stars due to the way it is presented on Amazon. If you are interested in highly abstract (as in analysis, not art) and theoretical design, then ignore my rating.

CA knows his stuff, and this should be read by any designer in any field for to learn what design is, and how to go about achieving great design.

I would like to read this book, but unfortunately that is completely impossible with the Kindle version. It's like they scanned the book, chopped the pages half, rotated them, randomly shuffled them, and pasted them back together. I've posted a screenshot of what it looks like.

Come in acceptable quality. satisfy with that price!!!

It is scanned and rotated throght 90 degrees which makes reading it difficult.

I loved Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" ... and with Synthesis of Form I not only find the ideas stimulating, but they also linger -- I find myself mulling them over and re-reading and reflecting well after reading a section. I'm not an architect but the implications for design are widely applicable. May be a bit conceptual/philosophical for some, but it was right in the wheelhouse for a reader like me.

Came with a worn out cover page. Pages are made of cheapest available brown paper. Compared to other books in the same price range quality is pretty low.

A little complicated to understand, but very knowledgeable for architecture field.

Un grande classico: C.A. apre orizzonti di scientificità per azioni spesso relegate nella più incidentale discrezionalità.Lo conoscevo in Italiano, lo ho riletto volentieri in Inglese.