Christopher Alexander led a team of architects in the writing of this book, which divides up space into a several hundred types of common patterns that occur in the physical world. The landmark book provides guidelines for non-professionals in the design of beautiful, usable spaces. The patterns cover a full range of spatial scales from the division of nation states to how to lay out a town, to how to position an office building or home, to how to arrange a personal garden. It provides a series of principles, many of which are the architect's equivalent to the laws of physics.