 |
Over time, Urban Design Associates
has developed techniques and working methods for practicing urban design
that have proven to be successful for our clients and have distinguished
us as a firm. While each project is unique and presents new challenges,
certain fundamentals have demonstrated sustained value over time.
Paradoxically, by standardizing our techniques and procedures, we have
been able to respond more effectively to the individual qualities of
each project and place.
This handbook presents those
methodologies as a “menu” of tools and techniques.
The working method we describe is one
of “uncovery,” an approach that helps us understand the impact of
physical design on the health and stability of a community. We return, often,
to built projects to assess what has worked—and what has not. We use that
information in an ongoing way to renew our design principles for buildings,
streets, neighborhoods, districts, cities, and regions. For that reason, this
document is not just a reference manual, it is also a work in progress.
We were surprised—and
gratified—by the level of interest this “in-house” handbook
has generated, not only among our fellow professionals, but also among public
agencies, developers, and schools of architecture and urban design. Therefore,
we decided to make it available to a larger audience.
RAY GINDROZ, Principal
Urban Design Associates
The Architectural Pattern Book:
A Tool for Building Great Neighborhoods
This volume features the use and
development of UDA Pattern Books© as a tool for implementing master plans for
neighborhoods, new towns and villages. UDA pioneered the development of the
21st Century Pattern Book to serve as a key component to bridge the gap between
the vision of a place and the way places are now designed and constructed.
The complex coordination and implementation tasks facing development groups
has led us to the development of our Pattern Books that illustrate the precedents
for the places being built, patterns for each neighborhood address, architectural
vocabularies and key elements and landscape elements.
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.
|
|
 |
|
