Travel Blog introduction

As some may know, I will be going abroad this spring to study in Brussels, Belgium with many members of my architecture studio from NDSU. As a means of reflecting on my experiences and to fulfill my duties as an American millennial in Europe, I'm going to maintain a weekly blog.

Not being one to talk about myself very often, I'm focusing primarily on architecture (surprise!). As guide and inspiration, I'm following patterns put forth in A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. I chose this book partially because it's been done before and as a first-time blogger, I need all the help I can get. But also because it's been my most reliable design tool for the last year. So throwing pure originality out the door, here's an introduction to the book as said best by the book itself:

Thanks To Ben Zerrien for influencing me to actually read this book and Tyler Voigt for sustained, mutual enthusiasm.

Quick note, A Pattern Language is a companion book to The Timeless Way of Building (which I haven't actually read yet...) so there are going to be references to it. In an effort to provide top notch blogging, I do plan on reading it. I just haven't yet. So... Here's the intro.

"In this book, we present one possible pattern language, of the kind called for in The Timeless Way. This language is extremely practical. It is a language that we have distilled from our own building and planning efforts over the last eight years. You can use it to work with your neighbors, to improve your town and neighborhood. You can use it to design a house for yourself, with your family; or to work with other people to design an office or a workshop or a public building like a school. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction.

The elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

...

In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole, and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it."