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• February 23rd, 2021

  With Alexander, we learn to look out, toward the environment, enhancing outer Centers and improving the world.

• February 25th, 2021

  The universe tends to let energy settle into distinct Centers. The big bang explodes an initial singularity into a flux which then anneals into constellations of stars and planets. We see space as a void dotted with a large but finite number of marbles.

• Thread on Visual Attention and Semantic Centers

  but I'm interested in this also because I wonder if Christopher Alexander's proto-scientific theory of Centers has been brought to empiricism in studies of visual attention

  and there is also a question for me about how to see Alexander's Centers as both visual and semantic he presents his "theory" sometimes in a mode of almost pure geometry but clearly he is attuned to how Centers are never purely geometric but always enmeshed in meaningness

  so I imagine an eye-tracking study of a visually complex scene with lots of contrasting items and geometric Centers and somewhat off-center, in the midst of everything, is a pregnant woman gently holding her hands around her exposed belly

• Thread on @kev_mcg's The Game of Quality

  also love this emphasis on mysteries, like allowing life to revolve around questions without needing them to be answered finally or straightforwardly, they can still be Centers of inquiry and activity https://t.co/inpFGO5pHB

  so that clarifies a little confusion I have about goal-crafting the Centers of my life are open-ended and irresolvable I can't always make goals as if my life is "already adequately characterized" my striving has to include the need for self-amendment and discovery

  and here is @kev_mcg making it clear how Christopher Alexander's style of enhancing the Centers in the environment inspired by Patterns is a way of reenchanting the world in a direct, material, pushing-atoms-around kind of way https://t.co/iA5oq5mcwX

  and a good reminder that creating Centers of life doesn't always depend on architecture or moving things, it's also a matter of perceiving and enacting on a more personal level https://t.co/5J9dkgOa8t

• 📰 Deep Laziness

  Centers are the basic building blocks of beauty, except that they’re rarely shaped like blocks. If you look at any beautiful thing, a building or a tree or a hand tool, it will possess strong Centers.

  Centers are “things” – shapes, plants, doorways, furniture, faces, eyes, motifs, bounded spaces, boundaries, clouds. The Centers form the seeds for the next structure-preserving transformation.

  In the context of behaviors, “Centers” might be activities, virtues, places, people, ambiances, longings, imaginings, memories, times of day, flavors. A well-developed center will be easy to see; it will produce positive emotion, a feeling of quiet ease, of non-separateness from the world. It will carry many layers of elaboration and generation. It may be completely worked into the fabric of life, touching and intertwining with other Centers.

  Behavioral “Centers” are the things that feel most like reflections of your own self, that seem to connect effortlessly to the underlying wholeness in your life. The most important ones tend to have old roots.

• 📰 The Long Path that Leads from the Making of Our World to God

  5. Centers

  In any part of what we call Nature, or any part of a building, we see, at many levels of scale, coherent entities or Centers, nested in each other, and overlapping each other. These coherent entities all have, in varying degree, some quality of “Life.”

  For any given center, this quality of life comes about as a result of cooperation between the other living Centers at several scales, which surround it, which contain it, and which appear within it.

• 📙 The Nature of Order

  The observations I have used to build a modified picture of space and matter are observations which are available to anyone. They are not, in themselves, very astonishing. Many of them were well known to traditional artisans and artists. But, precisely because the observational method of Descartes forbade us from seeing these observables, they have dropped out of awareness. It might be said (by an adherent of mechanistic thinking) that they must not be true, cannot be true, because if they were, something would be wrong with the machinelike representation of the universe. I, on the other hand, started with a different kind of observation. I knew, intuitively, that observation of the inner feeling in a work of building, and the fact that different works of art have more feeling or less feeling, is a real thing. I based my whole method of analysis on the observations that I got by following this method, and on the observables which this method exposes to view. And since, within this method, there is no arbitrary prohibition against discovering a nonmechanical Nature in the structure of space, I was able to consider and discover such a Nature. Thus the characteristics of the field of Centers which make it potentially profoundwhich make it the basis of great art and building - were available to my inspection, only because I used a method of observation that allowed me to check the feeling of a work as an objective matter.