The Architectural Pattern Book

Book excerpt: From the firm that produced The Urban Design Handbook comes a practical guide to developing and using pattern books -- a tradition stretching back to Vitruvius and Palladio, and the source of many beautiful houses -- to design neighborhoods in collaboration with production builders today. The Architectural Pattern Book traces the precedents of twenty-first-century manuals from the Renaissance to Georgian and Parisian urban assembly kits and colonial American pattern books. It documents the revival of the traditional architectural pattern book as a means of implementing urban design in large-scale developments by describing techniques and working methods of preparing guides for current design and construction processes, and it shows exemplars that will serve as models for contemporary designers.