A collection of architectural patterns, fascinating for their grasp and depiction of the social experience of a town. But perhaps more compelling is the process of design that it proposes: one which considers the environment and well-being of the user not as a means to an end but as the end itself.
Wise words about making things:
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 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.
Alexander, et al., A Pattern Language, page xiii
I love the use of the word “repair” here. It presumes that—while things are not perfect—neither are they forlorn.