The Architectural Pattern Book: A Tool for Building Great Neighborhoods

By Urban Design Associates W.W. Norton, 2004, 230 pp., $55 paperback. In the 1970s, Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates (UDA) photodocumented every house in a historic district in York, a small southcentral Pennsylvania city that had served briefly (in 1777) as capital of the rebellious 13 colonies and which still retains a sizable stock of fine old buildings. That project, aimed at preparing National Register guidelines for what was then the largest national historic district in the US, set UDA on the path toward studying, with exceptional diligence, the patterns of buildings, streets, landscapes, neighborhoods, and cities. From UDA’s work, the important rebirth of pattern books used by new urbanists has evolved and come to fruition. In the 19th century and earlier, pattern books were indispensable to builders, who operated largely without architects. Those practical guides enabled Greek Revival and other styles of architecture to spread throughout the US and give appealing shape to the communities of a growing nation. Today UDA is one of the premier creators of pattern books for traditional developments, ranging from urban infill projects of a few dozen acres to revitalization distributed throughout an entire city (see article on Norfolk, Virginia in the June 2004 New Urban News), to large greenfield developments such as Celebration, Florida. In The Architectural Pattern Book, principals and staff members at UDA provide a historical overview of design instructions (back to Vitruvius in first-century Rome), tell how pattern books were revived in the past 30 years, lay out the purpose and structure of such guides, and explain how to go about developing them. In contrast to codes, which mostly attempt to regulate building, pattern books try to set out a vision that everyone on the development team will embrace and want to follow. They help assure successful marketing. As UDA assembles them, pattern books relate the overall goals of a community or a development to the details the architects and contractors must master: placement of buildings on their lots, positioning of driveways and garages, selection of roof slopes, configuration of porches, proportions and dimensions of windows and doors, and so on. All the specifics are profusely illustrated in this volume. The title page says Ray Gindroz and Rob Robinson were the principal authors of The Architectural Pattern Book; Donald K. Carter, Barry J. Long Jr., and Paul Ostergaard also were authors, and additional contributions came from David R. Csont, Donald Kaliszewski, James H. Morgan, Donald G. Zeilman, David Lewis, and Karen Levine. This is one of the rare cases in which a book produced by a committee has turned out graceful and engaging, not to mention useful. u