Christopher Alexander

The Linz Café is the fifth and latest book in a series which includes The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, The Oregon Experiment, and The Production of Houses[.] Here for the first time, Christopher Alexander describes a single building, commissioned by the organizers of the 1980 summer exposition "Forum Design" in Linz, Austria, with the explicit intention of allowing him to express his ideas, concepts, feelings, and philosophy, in a single building. "I thought at once that people would be tired after walking so much in the exhibit," Alexander writes, "and that what was needed most of all was a beautiful place to sit down, be comfortable, have a cup of coffee or a beer, enjoy the beauty of the Danube." The book describes the process of its design and the feelings which prompted it. Reflecting ideas presented in his earlier books and offering tantalizing glimpses of work now in progress, it deals with the ultimate spiritual reality of building. Among other things, there are first sketches of ideas, so far not published elsewhere, of Alexander's theory of color, his love of ornament, and illustrations of the hand-painted flowers with which he covered the inside of the café in the last days before its opening. --From dust jacket.

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