2 comments about Living on An Acre: A Practical Guide to the Self-Reliant Life.

1. This book is great if you just retired and want to start a small hobbie farm and you have lots of money to spend, because that is what the Government wants you to do in this book. I think they really need to retitle this book because it is not fitting! It offers nothing of value if you really want to make a go at trying to live on a small scale farm and be self-suffient. They keep pointing you to buy this or spend money here to do that. But if your really trying to live off a small scale piece of land I would recommend Joel Salatin "You Can Farm."
   
   Good luck to you if you are going to try and do this!



2. This book offers very little useful information on rural living other than references for where to get real information. It gives a superficial overview of the many ways you can make a few dollars off of your cottage or hobby farm, but not enough details on any subject to be helpful.
   
   This book was obviously not intended for people wanting information about living on a small, rural homestead. Instead, it seems designed for bored yuppie housewives who want "something rural" on their bookshelf or who are looking for a few hobby ideas and little more.
   
   A better place to start for a Practical Guide to the Self Reliant Life would be : "How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle," by Charles Long.

4 comments about The Luminous Ground: The Nature of Order, Book 4.

1. This book is a free, original expression of nonduality, or non-separation, which is to say nothing is separate from existence. If you love art, architecture, color, light, inner light, incorporation of the tears and sadness of "the cares of the world," living a natural and open life, this book will show you how that love meets up with the truth of your existence.
   
   How can you "feel" non-separation or nonduality? By knowing that you exist. This is your sense of "I" that Alexander speaks of throughout this book. Or call it "I Am." Since everyone can know that they exist, their most fundamental nature is this "I" or "I Am." Valuing that you exist, valuing this "I" brings a sense of unity with all people, their creations, their appreciations, their failures, sadness and tears. It brings a sense of union with humanity.
   
   This feeling of existence is the crux of this book. It's not just feeling existence, but valuing existence. It almost sounds silly: "valuing existence." Such valuing leads to wonder that never ends and all works being done as a gift of existence to existence, or to God. It makes you focus on existence so that you create something that communicates multiple layers of meaning, the totality of existence, in a building or an artwork.
   
   Religion, art, physics, quantum theory, and mostly the "I," the true you, come together in this unusual, delightful, beautiful to hold and read, art book full of vibrant color photographs, pictures, and illustrations.
   
   If there is another edition or another volume, perhaps some of the more direct teachings of nonduality can be included. For example, the words of the great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi turn one toward a disposition most favorable for the understanding, absorbing, and integrating of Alexander's confessions about art and existence: "Existence or Consciousness is the only reality. If you enquire 'Who am I?' the mind will return to its source (or where it issued from). The thought which arose will also submerge. As you practice like this more and more, the power of the mind to remain as its source is increased."
   
   Jerry Katz
   One: Essential Writings on Nonduality



2. Alexander's Pattern Language series was/is a great accomplishment. It made the mysteries of good architectural design accessible to everyone. It attempted to liberate home- and town-building from the arrogant priesthood of professional architects and exposed the bankrupt values behind so much of contemporary building. It offered a deeply human alternative much more in tune with the way we really live.
   
   Not surprisingly it did very little to change professional practices. Even the few architects who are sympathetic to his viewpoint largely dismiss his ideas and methods as economically impractical, except for wealthy clients who can afford the time and money needed to build a home with such individual attention to every idiosyncratic detail. The one area Alexander has had a major influence on is computer program design -- there economic factors are not a constraint and his notions about recursive patterns and sequences have been taken seriously and had a lasting effect.
   
   Having made hardly a dent in his chosen profession, Alexander now appears to have turned his attention elsewhere - to the future and to his own posterity. In The Nature of Order, and especially in the final Book 4, he babbles on and on about his Holy Grail - an "astounding" new world view that will supposedly revolutionize civilization (and vindicate Alexander as a Prophet crying in the modern Wilderness), in which Science and Art, object and subject, ornament and function, beauty and practicality will at last be seen as One Living Whole, inextricably bound together in mystical union like the interwoven threads of the Turkish prayer rugs he is so enamored of. Then and only then will buildings express the True Self and Blaze with Spirit and Inner Light and Centers and Beings and "I-stuff", blah, blah, blah.
   
   The art history illustrations are lovely (by comparison, most of Alexander's own paintings and drawings look rather second-rate), but the half-baked metaphysical ramblings, dressed up as pseudo-science, are very tedious, overly intellectual, and hardly new. The 2500-year-old Buddhist canon and many other spiritual traditions, like Sufism, Taoism, the Hindu Upanishads or Native American and Aboriginal religious cosmologies, have all expressed this vision far more eloquently and effectively. Alexander gives these venerable traditions barely a nod of acknowledgment, except as visual evidence supporting his own vague and untestable theories - since they make no claims to Scientific Truth, as Alexander does relentlessly, he just ignores or co-opts their immense contributions.
   
   Give Alexander credit for his emphasis on personal feeling, but educating our feeling to make ever more accurate side-by-side discriminations between "degrees of life" can take us only so far as an aesthetic method. Being an artist is more a matter of life-long discipline and *practice* - above all, learning how to cultivate the right state of mind - natural and open, free from fixed concepts, beyond even the most refined intellectual judgments of good and bad, beautiful and ugly. It's not something to rattle on about for page after repetitive page, it's something to do - to discover how to do through doing, through direct experience. In my own work, books like John Daido Loori's Zen and Creativity and Chogyam Trungpa's Dharma Art, or Suzuki Roshi's Not Always So have been much more helpful and to the point.



3. I'm not an architect, though I do paint a bit and presume to teach. A friend from Ohio undertook one of Alexander's architectural courses, 20 years ago, and posted me notes on Alexander's colour theory. I've used them ever since. But the articulation of this guru's understanding of the experience world & how we process it & make art in and for it, has become keener, more subtle & concise over the years. This is a very, very profound teaching without any messianic overdrive. Indeed, its the patience and humility of Alexander's process of discovering essential rules & roles for making art, that are most profound and the enduring feature of his presentation. And the book's own look exemplifies his quest for the beautiful.I'm not so taken with the reproductions of his own painting, however. I can't quibble with the twentieth century masters he reproduces as evidence for enduring beauty. A fabulous book!



4. *** Original review: May 20, 2004 ***
   
   Those who know me know that I am not prone to making either quick judgements or vacuous statements, so my friends (at least) will know that both the title of this mini-review and the few words that follow are far from whimsical: Alexander's Nature of Order, and in particular this fourth volume which I have recently received and simply cannot put down, are in my humble opinion, destined to rank as one of this *world's* great literary/philosophical achievements. What Alexander has produced is nothing short of a brilliant vision for the transcendent reality that lies beneath and beyond conventional categories. I write this as a Ph.D. physicist, with two graduate-level mathematical physics texts under my belt (both on complex systems), and semi-pro photographer with 30 years of experience of trying to capture "beauty" in nature. Alexander's work has provided a tentative -- but oh so deep -- glimpse of an answer to my own philosophical struggles as scientist and artist: physics and art are but two sides of a vastly richer coin, and are merely pointers to an infinitely rich *life* that pervades this universe; indeed, the life that *is* this universe. Every human being who has ever sincerely pondered the question "Why?" when looking up at the sky, while admiring a pretty flower, or looking into a mirror, can do no better than to curl up by a fireplace with a hot cup of tea, open up volume four of this incredible set of books and start using the musings lovingly offered here to look within for answers. Truly a remarkable achievement. I have never met Christopher Alexander, but can honestly say that I have been deeply touched by this preternaturally wise soul.
   
   ***** Musings added Sep 1, 2005 *******
   
   Having now read the entire opus (I-IV), and currently on my 3rd reading of volume I, I am fully convinced that Alexander's Nature of Order is an absolutely stunning achievement of the highest caliber. I also concur with a quote that appears on the inner flap of the books, to the effect that while very few (if any) philosophical/conceptual works (and their authors) are likely to be remembered 500 years hence, there is a strong possibility that Alexander's Opus WILL be remembered as a precursor to what our present day (only partially overlapping fields of) "science" & "art" will have evolved to in 500 years (a unified, wholistic body of "Sci-Art" in which the schism between objective & subjective / inner & outer no longer exists).
   
   What Alexander presents in these books is a tentative first stab at a magnificent new CONCEPT; not a mathematical or physical theory (though rudiments of what might go into a more formal description are also discussed). Although many of Alexander's ideas are quite subtle and require thoughtful reflection to fully comprehend and integrate into (ironically) a whole (new worldview), the basic thesis is original and profound: EVERYTHING that exists contains "life", and the degree (lesser or greater) to which life is manifest in "X" can be *objectively* determined by probing one's *subjective* (inner) world. Nature is seen, in this view, simply as the totality of life, continually unfolding; and beauty (as generated by local life-forms such as humans), as a resonance between outwardly objective forms and (the very deepest) subjective inner feelings.
   
   Western science's longstanding divide between "what's out there in the world" and "what is in here, in our hearts and souls" is exchanged for a new worldview in which our understanding of the cosmos is predicated on an active unity between objectivity and subjectivity; between dispassionate form and intensely personal beauty; between "eye" and "I"; between the deepest inner feeling and continually unfolding outer life. If this sounds radical (and perhaps even a bit strange), that is because it IS radical; Alexander is proposing a sweeping idea that is both revolutionary and (only in hindsight, after having read his extraordinary Opus) obvious! For it really cannot be any other way! Every thinking -- no, every FEELING -- creature who wants to know our cosmos and his/her unique role in it needs to read these books. They are truly remarkable! The next great strides in art and science will be made (simultaneously) when, one day, an EINSTein-Alexander appears and uses the ideas expressed in these books to develop (using a mathematics not yet created) a rigorous new theory of "Sci-Art-Beauty-Life". These are ostensibly books on "architecture"; but they far -- FAR -- transcend that field; they speak, collectively, about everything that exists.

1 comments about The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design.

1. THE ART OF PLACEMAKING: INTERPRETING COMMUNITY THROUGH PUBLIC ART AND URBAN DESIGN is a pick for any college-level art or urban issues library and for professionals interested in public art and urban affairs. It's an exploration of works within the public imagination and explores trends in public art, from 'mural towns' and street furniture to public areas arts, documenting two decades of public arts projects from around the country. Color photos throughout feature the projects while descriptions survey interactions with public agencies, officials, and decision-makers in the process of bringing art into the public eye and making design choices.

3 comments about Stone House: A Guide to Self-Building With Slipforms.

1. The illustrations inside the book leaves much to be desired. The book is a "Self Guide" to construction; this makes it mandatory to have exceptional pictures, illustrations, and drawings! Sadly, to say notwithstanding, the book-cover the interior is disappointing.



2. Tomm Stanley has written an excellent book that is both instructional and entertaining. He has the experience and forethought to prove that he isn't some hippie with unproven thoughts/ideas, but he also writes in a very warm and personable way that keeps his book from being a dry, tasteless "how to" construction book. He is frank with his mistakes, offers proven and tested solutions openly, and explains things scientifically enough to satisfy this reviewer (I'm an engineer).
   
   My only slight complaint is that many of the photos are terrible quality and you must go to the book's website to view the higher quality versions. This isn't too bad, but I worry that someday the website will move/discontinue and I'll be left with a book poorly illustrated.



3. It's easy to build it yourself with slipforms - especially if you also have in hand Tomm Stanley's Stone House, covering slipforming methods, sources for materials, stonelaying techniques, and more. Tomm Stanley and his partner know their stuff: he built his own home from slipforms and his construction photos can even be seen on-line in color - most included with this book, in black and white.

5 comments about Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.

1. Los Angeles. There were a few years there when Los Angles was the center of the world. 1965-1985, give or take a few years. Oh yes, even the Brits were raving. David Hockney had declared LA the best place to paint ("Splash") and Reyner Banham declared LA the city of tomorrow. Things were cooking and I was there. Then things started to go wrong. Spielberg and the boys from USC took over Hollywood and turned the city from a culture center into an amusement park. The pollution started to get too dangerous to laugh at. The gangs took over much of the fringe. There was Rodney King, O.J., riots, earthquakes, fires, gang warfare. All in all, the city was destroyed. Who knows what Banham might make of the place now. This is a great little book.



2. The book was exactly what I wanted for a Christmas present and at a good price.



3. Even though Banham's book was written in the early '70's, it remains a cogent view of a metropolis that has changed yet remained the same. It is a place, yes a real place, that is defined by geography and the various cultures of its inhabitants to a unique degree. Architecture is but a backdrop to Banham's larger point about the inter-relationship of people to the natural and built environments. The perspective of 35 years only sharpens the observations made by the insightful author.



4. Outstanding book about Los Angeles, a must-read for anyone interested in history, architecture, and culture.It reads like poetry.



5. Reyner Banham's writing is intelligent and entertaining. He has taken LA to heart and reveals how its "four ecologies" have affected its contemporary appearance and character. You'll not only learn how LA's architecture came to be as it is, but learn a great deal about the history and personality of the city as well. I read this book to get to know LA better. I couldn't have picked a better one.

2 comments about The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History.

1. The Historical Perspective:

   Hayden is an urban historian; she is concerned with the interpretation of historic places, people, movements and events. She specifically writes about woman's and ethnic histories in urban places. The Power of Place documents both a preservation project and the history to be preserved.

   Hayden is involved in a relatively new movement of historians and geographers who are reexamining the use of space by society. Her geographic-historical perspective is reflected in many contemporary scholars, including Michael Dear, Jennifer Wolch, David Harvey, and Henri Lefebver.

   Relevance to Planning and Urban Design:

   Planners involved in historic preservation should understand that the historic preservation of the architecture and histories of multiple classes, ethnicities, and genders is important. Urban renewal and economic development is a powerful tool that can cleanse the landscape of any references to past inhabitants -- their struggles, lives, and uses of place. As we see with the Biddy Mason wall, good design can acknowledge the existence of previous uses even if no structure remains. With this in mind, there is a considerable amount of history yet to be acknowledged with appropriate monuments. So Hayden defines the power of place as: "The Power of ordinary urban landscape to nurture citizens' public memory, to encompass shared time in the form of shared memory".

   A must read for urban planners involved in historic preservation.




2. Dolores Hayden's book, The Power of Place, is a comprehensive guide for anyone whose goal is to engage in an examination of spaces and places. It retains a historical perspective that allows the reader to apply the places focused upon by Hayden to his or her own specific spatial examination. While she focuses specific attention on the Los Angeles area, I found her work compatible with any examination of spatial use or spatial history and contextualization. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the power of place.

5 comments about Mutations.

1. This ridiculous book is nothing more and nothing less than a sad example of the disdain these authors feel for the world at large and for their poor readers in particular. Riddled with typos, filled with pictures of the poorest quality and utterly devoid of any original ideas, the book falls back, again and again, on worn, political cliches and pompous, unnecessarily complex phrasings that serve only one purpose: to conceal the fact that there is absolutely nothing of worth or merit being said here (beyond the incredibly, utterly astounding insight that cities, third world cities especially, are growing pretty darn fast!) At certain points it seems that even the writers can't follow their own ramblings. One particularly confused contributor (McKenzie Wark) writes " . . . technologies enclose, they count and rank what they enclose." Then, four sentences later, he/she writes: "Technologies do not enframe. There's no enclosure . . ." And that is about as coherent as that writer gets. One can only conclude that these people never expected anyone to actually read their book, since they obviously didn't take the time to read it themselves. Thank you Rem Koolhaas and your band of incompetent contributors for wasting my time and money on this utter disgrace of a book.



2. this book is packed with info. some of it is relatively hard to get at (your eyes are likely to glaze over at the reams of essays formatted in a narrow, sans-serif OCR-esque font) but the content and data is pretty good. it looks very nice in your bookshelf, but when hitting it up for a re-read, you may find yourself cursing the designers' decisions to go with form over function, IMHO.



3. This book is to be considered a piece of historical evidence of the tendencies of thought of the new era. Whether you may find the concepts proposed not suitable, every prospective or practicing architect, designer or urban planner must be aware of the latest tendencies of thought in order to be the best-educated he/she can be.

   The Pearl River Delta investigation is impecable. For the "reasonably intelligent person" that wrote a comment above, it is a shame that you overlooked the whole analysis on shopping, perhaps because you are so immersed in it in the USA that you cannot see the forest for the trees.

   I agree that the language is dense and often martian-like. This is the case of the introductory essay "Telegram from nowhere". But read between the lines. Reading is re-reading said Joyce. You will find a very smart concept regarding the architecture built for the media.

   This book is all about cities in different parts in the world. It helps a lot if you are a culturally aware person. If you have had contact with diverse forms of living and thinking, may I highly suggest you get hold of this book. If you are not, you may either feel that the text is just wobbling on things you cannot be empathic with, or you may be on your way to becoming a more educated human being. And do not think by any means that this is a meek and mild pro-globalization text. This book is just rasing questions and proposing concepts, like all masterpiece limit themselves to do.




4. This book was a required textbook for an urban planning class I took at college. I was very disappointed with the book overall. The photographs were very nice, but the text was utterly confusing, and difficult to follow. I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person, but I could not grasp most of what the authors were trying to say. The only parts of the book I enjoyed was the sections on the United States, which covered urban sprawl, gangs in cities, generic, look-alike architecture, etc. The rest of the book left much to be desired. The other students in my urban planning class agreed with my opinion of the book. Nobody seemed to get much use out of it except for the professor.



5. I bought this book because of the Pearl River Delta Study. For me who actually grew up in that part of the world I wanted to see how these "foreigners" look at my home town. It gave me new insights on how to look at cities... in a different way.. in different eyes. To me it is valuable at least in this sense.

No comments about Landscape Architecture: Water Features (Landscape Architecture).

No comments about Worlds Away.

4 comments about Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt (Phoenix Books).

1. For those of you looking for a book on how to build a house cheaply this is not for you. This book is on how to give poor people the means to build homes, and communities, get educated, and develop careers all at the same time. All this can be orchestrated by an architect who understands the needs of the people he is designing for. Every architectural student should be required to read this book.



2. 'Architecture for the Poor' by Dr Hassan Fathy

   Sometimes a book is so ahead of its time it can sink beneath the waves before it's appreciated. Such a book was 'Architecture for the Poor', written in 1969 and originally published by the Ministry of Culture in Cairo. Written with the help of a fellowship from the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs it was published in America by the University of Chicago in 1973 and in a second impression in 1976. But even then it was only taken up by the fringes of the solar energy movement as a neat idea for a different culture and climate. Currently its out of print. The author died in 1989 having received some praise in his home country of Egypt but having seen no actions to take up his ideas for helping peasants take control of their lives by taking charge of the creation of their homes and communities.

   Dr Fathy was officially an architect but his talents as an amateur anthropologist, sociologist, psychologist, inventor, and economist are what make him great. His holistic approach to solving the housing problems of a poverty level community (and his vision to see how they could be applied to a whole country) takes in the gamut from reviving the craft of mud brick making (along with the traditional masonry building of vaults and domes to roof simple mud structures) through to solving the problems of parasitic worm infections that debilitate entire populations infected through their water supply systems. Every aspect of village life receives his attention: how to adapt an Austrian heating system to make a cooking stove more efficient, how to share a house with cows more hygienically, where to do laundry, how to build a better school, how to provide an alternative income from tomb robbing for the peasants, and how to tactfully delouse peasants using the luxury of a Turkish bathhouse rather than the chilly chemicals of a government mandated cold shower.

   His appreciation that some inefficiencies are functional within a society makes the changes he does make even more impressive. Fetching water from the village pump in water jars is one of the few occasions a girl has to be seen out in public in Moslem society. Providing running water to every house would derail the marriage process within that society. However he is happy to create plumbing inside the home ? running pipes to the kitchen from rooftop storage jars across the middle of rooms, so if they leak the occupants will have to fix them not ignore the drips until the wall is eroded. Fathy's changes are not just improvements to make a peasants life more like a modern westerners life ? that is impossible given the astonishingly low income of these people. They are changes that make life easier or healthier while striving to maintain traditions and strengthen society because they understand what is behind the tradition. For example splitting the village up into single home farmsteads would expose the individual families to roaming bands of thieves, so it's necessary to let houses huddle together for protection and for cows ? more valuable than children ? to stay inside the house.

   Yet this book is not just about practicalities of house or village building ? it's also about the need for beauty in the life of even the poorest amongst us. Dr Fahey's desire to restore an appreciation for craftsmanship to all members of society especially by restoring the ability of the poor to control the creation of their own homes is inspiring. An architect can help the process along only if he or she can learn to see life outside the urban world of modern design. This book shows how an architect with an academic education can be of some help to a peasant faced with grinding poverty but only if equipped with the ability to move to the world of that peasant and see how alien western technological solutions can be.

   Fahey's ideas are not just applicable to Egyptian society, reading this book made me aware of the similarities of problems faced by peoples in many middle eastern countries, particularly Afghanistan which is trying to rebuild itself and could use Dr Fahey's techniques to rehouse its population cheaply and empoweringly. It's even possible to extend his ideas to other hot dry climates such as Southern California, and the desert states of the US, to Mediterranean countries and to many parts of Africa, South America, and Australia. Wherever issues of building cost or those of insulation, shelter and energy efficiency in a hot dry climate need addressing Dr Fahey's solutions should be considered. This book needs to be reprinted; clamor for copies and see if we can make it the bestseller it should have been the first time around.

   ISBN 0-226-23916-0




3. This book should be required reading to obtain an Architect's license. Mr Fathy is far from perfect, but his message of democratic economy is desperately needed and eloquently stated, and his mixture of respect for and scientific evaluation of traditional building techniques is inspiring.



4. This book sets a new theory in architecture by the famouce Egyptian architect Hasan Fathy. Fathy argues that you can build fancy buildings without using expensive materials. He practiced his theory in Upper Egypt, Mexico, and many other countries.