167 - Six-Foot Balcony ** Balconies and porches which are less than six feet deep are hardly ever used.

71 - Still Water * To be in touch with water, we must above all be able to swim; and to swim daily, the pools and ponds and holes for swimming must be so widely scattered through the city, that each person can reach one within minutes.

2 - The Distribution of Towns If the population of a region is weighted too far toward small villages, modern civilization can never emerge; but if the population is weighted too far toward big cities, the earth will go to ruin because the population isn't where it needs to be, to take care of it.

175 - Greenhouse Many efforts are being made to harness solar energy by converting it into hot water or electric power. And yet the easiest way to harness solar energy is the most obvious and the oldest: namely, to trap the heat inside a greenhouse and use it for growing flowers and vegetables.

65 - Birth Places It seems unlikely that any process which treats childbirth as a sickness could possibly be a healthy part of a healthy society.

138 - Sleeping to the East * This is one of the patterns people most often disagree with. However, we believe they are mistaken.

132 - Short Passages * ". . . long, sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture."

83 - Master and Aprentices * The fundamental learning situation is one in which a person learns by helping someone who really knows what he is doing.

62 - High Places * The instinct to climb up to some high place, from which you can look down and survey your world, seems to be a fundamental human instinct.

146 - Flexible Office Space 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?

166 - Gallery Surround * If people cannot walk out from the building onto balconies and terraces which look toward the outdoor space around the building, then neither they themselves nor the people outside have any medium which helps them feel the building and the larger public world are

185 - Sitting Circle * 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,

41 - Work Community ** If you spend eight hours of your day at work, and eight hours at home, there is no reason why your workplace should be any less of a community than your home.

147 - Communal Eating * Without communal eating, no human group can hold together.

236 - Windows which Open Wide * Many buildings nowadays have no opening windows at all; and many of the opening windows that people do build, don't do the job that opening windows ought to do.

5 - Lace of Country Streets The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement.

83 - Master and Aprentices * The fundamental learning situation is one in which a person learns by helping someone who really knows what he is doing.

13 - Subculture Boundary The mosaic of subcultures requires that hundreds of different cultures live, in their own way, at full intensity, next door to one another. But subcultures have their own ecology. They can only live at full intensity, unhampered by their neighbors, if they are physically

6 - Country Towns * The big city is a magnet. It is terribly hard for small towns to stay alive and healthy in the face of central urban growth.

246 - Climbing Plants A building finally becomes a part of its surroundings when the plants grow over parts of it as freely as they grow along the ground.

25 - Access to Water * People have a fundamental yearning for great bodies of water. But the very movement of the people toward the water can also destroy the water.

66 - Holy Ground * What is a church or temple? It is a place of worship, spirit, contemplation, of course. But above all, from a human point of view, it is a gateway. A person comes into the world through the church. He leaves it through the church. And, at each of the important thresholds of his

183 - Workspace Enclosure ** People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance.

27 - Men and Women The world of a town in the 1970's is split along sexual lines. Suburbs are for women, workplaces for men; kindergartens are for women, professional schools for men; supermarkets are for women, hardware stores for men.

36 - Degrees of Publicness ** People are different, and the way they want to place their houses in a neighborhood is one of the most basic kinds of difference.

2 - The Distribution of Towns If the population of a region is weighted too far toward small villages, modern civilization can never emerge; but if the population is weighted too far toward big cities, the earth will go to ruin because the population isn't where it needs to be, to take care of it.

142 - Sequence of Sitting Spaces * 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.

156 - Settled Work * The experience of settled work is a prerequisite for peace of mind in old age. Yet our society undermines this experience by making a rift between working life and retirement, and between workplace and home.

156 - Settled Work * The experience of settled work is a prerequisite for peace of mind in old age. Yet our society undermines this experience by making a rift between working life and retirement, and between workplace and home.

179 - Alcoves ** No homogeneous room, of homogeneous height, can serve a group of people well. To give a group a chance to be together, as a group, a room must also give them the chance to be alone, in one's and two's in the same space.

65 - Birth Places It seems unlikely that any process which treats childbirth as a sickness could possibly be a healthy part of a healthy society.

51 - Green Streets ** There is too much hot hard asphalt in the world. A local road, which only gives access to buildings, needs a few stones for the wheels of the cars; nothing more. Most of it can still be green.

118 - Roof Garden * A vast part of the earth's surface, in a town, consists of roofs. Couple this with the fact that the total area of a town which can be exposed to the sun is finite, and you will realize that is is natural, and indeed essential, to make roofs which take advantage of the sun and

119 - Arcades ** Arcades - covered walkways at the edge of buildings, which are partly inside, partly outside - play a vital role in the way that people interact with buildings.

46 - Market of Many Shops ** It is natural and convenient to want a market where all the different foods and household goods you need can be bought under a single roof. But when the market has a single management, like a supermarket, the foods are bland, and there is no joy in going there.

19 - Web of Shopping * Shops rarely place themselves in those positions which best serve the people's needs, and also guarantee their own stability.

112 - Entrance Transition ** Buildings, and especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street.

86 - Children The task of looking - after little children is a much deeper and more fundamental social issue than the phrases "babysitting" and "child care" suggest.

181 - The Fire * There is no substitute for fire.

5 - Lace of Country Streets The suburb is an obsolete and contradictory form of human settlement.

35 - Household Mix * No one stage in the life cycle is self-sufficient.

95 - Building Complex ** A building cannot be a human building unless it is a complex of still smaller buildings or smaller parts which manifest its own internal social facts.

8 - Mosaic of Subcultures ** The homogeneous and undifferentiated character of modern cities kills all variety of life styles and arrests the growth of individual character.

73 - Adventure Playground A castle, made of cartons, rocks, and old branches, by a group of children for themselves, is worth a thousand perfectly detailed, exactly finished castles, made for them in a factory.

166 - Gallery Surround * If people cannot walk out from the building onto balconies and terraces which look toward the outdoor space around the building, then neither they themselves nor the people outside have any medium which helps them feel the building and the larger public world are

26 - Life Cycle * All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.

45 - Necklace of Community Projects The local town hall will not be an honest part of the community which lives around it, unIess it is itself surrounded by all kinds of small community activities and projects, generated by the people for themselves.

115 - Courtyards which Live ** The courtyards built in modern buildings are very often dead. They are intended to be private open spaces for people to use - but they end up unused, full of gravel and abstract sculptures.

159 - Light on Two Sides of Every Room ** When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.

42 - Industrial Ribbon * Exaggerated zoning laws separate industry from the rest of urban life completely, and contribute to the plastic unreality of sheltered residential neighborhoods.