Throughout the book, these details are identified in language that rings familiar to anyone acquainted with A Pattern Language: “light to walk toward” … “a continuous band of tile” … “big kitchen window” … “entry sequence” … “window like a miniature painting.” In many cases, the detail being examined is illustrated - in a “picture this” sidebar-first by its presence, then by its absence. This character, she writes, is in the details, whether “a relatively small thing - a doorknob, a newel post, a shelf bracket … larger elements such as window seats and breakfast nooks, hearths and accent walls, built-in cabinets and kitchen islands.” It would still have a character all its own.” Susanka has increasingly adapted the Alexandrian language of patterns into her books, and Inside the Not So Big House, co-authored with architect Marc Vassallo, is, in its much smaller and more relaxed way, a book of integrated patterns meant to help homeowners and architects create living spaces that are “designed well at every scale … so that even if the house were completely emptied of furniture and objects collected over a lifetime, would still feel warm and inviting. Although the names of some patterns seem no more than labels (“interchange,” “duct space”), the patterns all embody solutions, and therefore judgments, and many clearly identify desirable features: “sunny counter,” “built-in seats,” “deep reveals.” The next 105 concern the siting of buildings and paths and the external and internal design of buildings, and the final 49 lay out structural details within a building. The first 94 of the 253 patterns in A Pattern Language define elements of towns or communities. It is largely as a result of their work, which has provided inspiration for a generation of architects, that I came to write my own book.” “A Pattern Language,” Susanka wrote, “struck me early in my education as the most appropriate way to think about architectural design, buildings, and the people who inhabit them. IN THE BOOK THAT inaugurated her campaign as the champion of the “not so big house” in 1998, Sarah Susanka acknowledged her debt to the architect Christopher Alexander, who, with his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure at UC Berkeley during the sixties and seventies, developed a “new theory of architecture, building and planning.” Their first and most exhaustive explication of that theory, A Pattern Language, was published in 1977.

Inside the not so big house