Excerpts from Christopher Alexander book A Pattern Language
Is it possible to create a kind of space which is specifically tuned to the needs of people working, and yet capable of an infinite number of various arrangements and combinations within it?
Lay out the office space as wings of open space, with free standing columns around their edges, so they define half private and common spaces opening into one another. Set down enough columns so that people can fill them in over the years, in many different ways - but always in a semi-permanent fashion. If you happen to know the working group before you build the space, then make it more like a house, more closely tailored to their needs. In either case, create a variety of space throughout the office - comparable in variety to the different sizes and kinds of space in a large old house.
Source: Christopher Alexander's pattern language 146
Without communal eating, no human group can hold together. Give every institution and social group a place where people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular event. In particular, start a common lunch in every work place, so that a genuine meal around a common table (not out of boxes, machines, or bags) becomes an important, comfortable, and daily event with room for invited guests. In our own work group at the Center, we found this worked most beautifully when we took it in turns to cook the lunch. The lunch became an event: a gathering: something that each of us put our love and energy into, on our day to cook.
Source: Christopher Alexander pattern language 147
When more than half a dozen people work in the same place, it is essential that they not be forced to work in one huge undifferentiated space, but that instead, they can divide their workspace up, and so form smaller groups. Break institutions into small, spatially identifiable work groups, with less than half a dozen people in each. Arrange these work groups so that each person is in at least partial view of the other members of his own group; and arrange several groups in such a way that they share a common entrance, food, office equipment, drinking fountains, bathrooms. Source: Christopher Alexander pattern language 148
Have you ever walked into a public building and been processed by the receptionist as if you were a package? Arrange a series of welcoming things immediately in- side the entrance—soft chairs, a fireplace, food, coffee. Place the reception desk so that it is not between the receptionist and the welcoming area, but to one side at an angle—so that she, or he, can get up and walk toward the people who come in, greet them, and then invite them to sit down Source: Christopher Alexander pattern language 149
The larger meetings are, the less people get out of them. But institutions often put their money and attention into large meeting rooms and lecture halls.
Therefore,
Make at least 70 per cent of all meeting rooms really small - for 12 people or less. Locate them in the most public parts of the building, evenly scattered among the workplaces.
Source: Christopher Alexander pattern language 151
A group of chairs, a sofa and a chair, a pile of cushions - these are the most obvious things in everybody's life - and yet to make them work, so people become animated and alive in them, is a very subtle business. Most seating arrangements are sterile, people avoid them, nothing ever happens there. Others seem somehow to gather life around them, to concentrate and liberate energy. What is the difference between the two? Place each sitting space in a position which is protected, not cut by paths or movement, roughly circular, made so that the room itself helps to suggest the circle - not too strongly - with paths and activities around it, so that people naturally gravitate toward the chairs when they get into the mood to sit. Place the chairs and cushions loosely in the circle, and have a few too many. Source: Christopher Alexander pattern language 185
No social group - whether a family, a work group, or a school group - can survive without constant informal contact among its members. Create a single common area for every social group. Locate it at the center of gravity of all the spaces the group occupies, and in such a way that the paths which go in and out of the building lie tangent to it.
Source: Christopher Alexander pattern language 129
Unless the spaces in a building are arranged in a sequence which corresponds to their degrees of privateness, the visits made by strangers, friends, guests, clients, family, will always be a little awkward. Lay out the spaces of a building so that they create a sequence which begins with the entrance and the most public parts of the building, then leads into the slightly more private areas, and finally to the most private domains.
Source: Christopher Alexander pattern language 127
Every corner of a building is a potential sitting space. But each sitting space has different needs for comfort and enclosure according to its position in the intimacy gradient Put in a sequence of graded sitting spaces throughout the building, varying according to their degree of enclosure. Enclose the most formal ones entirely, in rooms by themselves; put the least formal ones in corners of other rooms, without any kind of screen around them; and place the intermediate one with a partial enclosure round them to keep them connected to some larger space, but also partly separate.
Source: Christopher Alexander pattern language 142