Design Patterns is more like the Human Factors and Ergonomics Handbook.

You can have your building engineered, in which case building walls out of 2x6's 16 inches on center is not off the table, but neither is a mortise and tenon timber frame with partition walls. In that paradigm, the code tries not to be descriptive of an exact technique but only gives you criteria to satisfy. For example you could run all of your electrical wiring on the outside of the walls or on the outside of the building, and you could use ramps instead of staircases. It only talks about ingress and egress for fire safety, and it explains how you're supposed to encase wires, or if wires are not encased it describes the way the wiring must be sheathed to protect the occupants.

You can heat your house entirely with an open fire, and the code speaks to how to do that safely. So it's unlike "design patterns" in a lot of ways in that the code tries to accommodate the kinds of buildings we try to build and the ways in which we modify buildings because that's easier than saying "these are all the allowed ways of building an entry staircase." Design Patterns are more in the latter category.