Christopher Alexander The search for beauty

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In poor design, sometimes, in order to give an entity good shape, the
background space where it lies has left-over shape, or no shape at all. It is
merely left over.
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Good Shape
" Good shape is the characteristic of a center that it is somehow beautiful by itself
" A center has good shape when it is reinforced by other centers of good shape
" A center has good shape when it is made of centers of good shape
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Local Symmetries
Wherever there is a local symmetry, there tends to be a center.
Living things, though often symmetrical, rarely have perfect symmetry.
Indeed, perfect symmetry is often a mark of death in things rather than life.
Observe, first, that overall symmetry in a system, by itself, is not a strong
source of life or wholeness.
In general, a large symmetry of the simplified neoclassicist type rarely
contributes to the life of a thing, because in any complex whole in the world,
there are nearly always complex, asymmetrical forces at work matters of
location, and context, and function which require that symmetry be
broken.
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Deep Interlock and Ambiguity
" Centers are sometimes hooked into their surroundings
" It is sometimes difficult to disentangle a center from its surroundings
" . . . through actual interlock
" . . . through an ambiguous zone which belongs both to the center and to its
surroundings
" A Go board in mid-game
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Contrast
Another feature I have found repeatedly in works of art which have great life
is that they often have surprisingly intense contrast in them far more than
one remembers, more than one imagines would be helpful or even possible to
sustain.
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Gradients
You have noticed I am sure, as I have, that almost anything which has real
life has a certain softness. Qualities vary, slowly, subtly, gradually, across the
extent of each thing. Gradients occur. One quality changes slowly across
space, and becomes another.
Almost always the strengthened field-like character of the center is caused, in
part, by the fact that an organization of smaller centers creates gradients
which point to some new and larger virtual center. Sometimes the arrows
and gradients set up in the field give the center its primary strength.
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Roughness
Things which have real life always have a certain ease, a morphological
roughness. It is not a residue of technically inferior culture, or the result of
handcraft or inaccuracy. It is an essential structural feature which they have
and without which a things cannot be whole.
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Roughness
Often the border of an ancient carpet is irregular where it goes round the
corner that is, the design breaks, the corner seems patched together. This
does not happen through carelessness or inaccuracy. On the contrary, it
happens because the weaver is paying close attention to the positive and
negative, to the alternating repetition of the border, to the good shape of each
compartment of the wave and each bit of open space and makes an effort
all along the border to be sure these are just right. To keep all of them just
right along the length of the border, some loose and makeshift composition
must be done at the corner.
If the weaver wanted instead to calculate or plot out a so-called perfect
solution to the corner, she would then have to abandon her constant paying
attention to the right size, right shape, right positive-negative of the border
elements, because these would all be determined mechanically by outside
considerations i.e., by the grid of the border. The corner solution would
then dominate the design in a way which would destroy the weaver s ability
to do what is just right at each point. The life of the design would be
destroyed.
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
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Roughness
All my examples show how the seemingly rough solution which seems
superficially inaccurate is in fact more precise, not less so, because it comes
about as a result of paying attention to what matters most, and letting go of
what matters less. As the power of this completed carpet clearly shows, a
perfect corner does not matter nearly as much as the correct balance and
positive space in the border. The seemingly rough arrangement is more
precise because it comes from a much more careful guarding of the
essential centers in the design.
In a man-made thing, another essential aspect of the property of roughness,
is its abandon. Roughness can never be consciously or deliberately created.
Then it is merely contrived. To make a thing live, its roughness must be the
product of egolessness, the product of no will.
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Echoes
When Echoes is present, the various smaller elements and centers, from
which the larger centers are made, are all members of the same family, they
contain echoes of one another, there are deep internal similarities between [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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