Category: Design
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The Unfolding of 17th Century Amsterdam
… reminder – you are looking at 100 years in a few minutes! via Yodan Rofe of Building Beauty
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Sequence: The Difference Between a Novice and a Master
The experienced carpenter keeps going … every action he performs, is calculated in such a way that some later action can put it right to the extent that it is imperfect now. What is critical here, is the sequence of events. The carpenter neves takes a step which he cannot correct later; so he can…
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The Order of the Language
Design is often thought of as a process of synthesis, a process of putting together things, a process of combination. According to this view, a whole is created by putting together parts. The parts come first: the the form of the whole comes second. But it is impossible to form anything which has the character…
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Attention to Reality
And it is in the end only when our feelings are perfectly in touch with the reality of forces, that we begin to see the patterns which are capable of generating life. That is what is hard – because so often people choose to put their own opinions forward, in place of reality. … Yet…
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… not quite adding!?
Ryan Singer posted this on twitter: “Adding” and “integration” are different operations: Adding: Bolt working wholes together w/ no problem solving. Integration: Solve lots of problems to connect parts together into a working whole. Complex problem? Orthogonalize into integration problems that can then be added. source I had to read it a couple of times…
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Space is Not Mute
… Here right now was the space of my building, as plain and fresh as it would ever be. And what it helped me to understand is that space is not mute, that it does speak to us, and hat we respond to it more directly, more viscerally, than all the cerebral, left brained talk…
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Echoes from Building Beauty Seminar of April 4th 2019
1: Project as a Living Being!? In my experience as a Yoga practitioner there is only so much that can be done on the mat. Ultimately the work and qualities of Yoga push up against the realities of life. There is where the real work of change happens. What changes can I make in my…
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Yoga of Groups
Yoga is a solitary practice, it focuses inwards … my body, my breath, my attention. Maybe that is one of the reasons it appealed to me. When I researched Yoga, I also considered martial arts where there seems to me to be more potential for interaction with at least one other human being. But I…
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Christopher Alexander – The Stress Reservoir
Broadly speaking, the reaction to each unsolved problem, or annoyance, or conflict that is encountered creates in the individual some level of stress … There is, in effect, a stress reservoir in the body …
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Christopher Alexander – The Character of Living Structure
In nature the principle of unfolding wholeness … creates living structure nearly all the time. Human designers, who are not constrained by this unfolding, can violate the wholeness if they wish to, and can therefore create non-living structure as often as they choose.
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Christopher Alexander – The Fifteen Properties in Nature
I chose to do a brief summary of this section, giving preference to the wholeness of the theme of the properties in nature (over giving more attention to each property). It was a journey, first reading through it, not knowing how/what to extract. By the time I read through, certain excerpts popped out of the…
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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 15: Not-Separateness
The correct connection to the world will only be made if you are conscious, willing, that the thing you make be indistinguishable from its surroundings, that, truly, you cannot tell where one ends and the next begins, and you do not even want to be able to do so
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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 14: Simplicity and Inner Calm
It has to do with a certain slowness, majesty, quietness, which I think of as inner calm … The quality comes about when everything unnecessary is removed
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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 13: The Void
This emptiness is needed, in some form, by every center … It is the quiet that draws the center’s energy of itself, gives it the basis of its strength
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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 12: Echoes
there is a deep underlying similarity – a family resemblance – among the elements, so deep that everything seems to be related, and yet one doesn’t quite know why, or what causes it. That is what I mean by ‘echoes.’
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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 11: Roughness
The seemingly rough arrangement is more precise because it comes from a much more careful guarding of the essential centers in the design … 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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Christopher Alexander – Fundamental Property 10: Gradients
“… Gradients must arise in the world when the world is in harmony with itself simply because conditions vary. Qualities vary, so centers which are adapted to them respond by varying in size, spacing, intensity and character. Daylight varies from the top floor of an urban building to the bottom floor: both windows and ceiling…
