Related tools
The articles on this site are mostly about theory and about Homemaker’s own evolutionary engine, but several other, separate tools have grown up around the same ideas. This page is a short index of them.
apl-companion
A single-file, no-server web app that lists all 253 patterns from A Pattern Language — title, number, confidence rating, problem, solution, and the higher/lower cross-references between patterns — with collapsible sections, and lets you build and share a curated subset of patterns via the page’s URL. The problem/solution text is deliberately paraphrased rather than quoted, so the tool stays a companion to the book rather than a substitute for buying it.
It’s also the front end to a published research method for turning a curated pattern subset into an LLM-generated design narrative, now deployed in a live public design dispute — see LLM pattern-language synthesis.
apl-companion — no cookies, no tracking, no external requests.
centres
A computational attempt at Christopher Alexander’s other major theory, wholeness from The Nature of Order — and an unusually honest one, still an open research problem rather than a finished measurement. This is a different enough strand of Alexander’s thinking, and involved enough in its own right, to have its own page.
homemaker-addon and homemaker-web
The interactive counterpart to Homemaker’s hands-off evolutionary engine — a Blender add-on and a no-Blender browser editor, both turning simple 3D geometry into a real IFC building model. This is a big enough software stack in its own right to have its own page.
homemaker-layout
A from-scratch Python rewrite of the evolution engine described in the Software Overview, currently active development rather than a finished tool. The Perl engine derives room sizes top-down from a tree of division ratios, which makes it hard to hit a specific target room size and makes crossover between two designs behave unpredictably. The Python rewrite inverts this: room sizes are set as targets up front, and the tree of division ratios is solved to fit them — the same programme-driven idea now also available in the current Perl engine (see Software Overview), but built around it from the ground up rather than added on.
© 2026 Bruno Postle (mail: bruno at postle dot net). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Last updated 15 September 2026.