1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  2. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
  3. Abo, Akinori 9
  4. aesthetics 19
  5. agile 30
  6. Albers, Josef 17
  7. Alexander, Christopher 135
  8. Alexander, Scott 5
  9. Allsopp, John 4
  10. Ammer, Ralph 6
  11. Anderson, Gretchen 7
  12. anxiety 9
  13. Appleton, Maggie 5
  14. Aptekar-Cassels, Wesley 5
  15. Arango, Jorge 4
  16. architecture 110
  17. art 86
  18. Asimov, Isaac 5
  19. attention 17
  20. Auping, Michael 6
  21. Aurelius, Marcus 14
  22. Bachelard, Gaston 12
  23. Baker, Nicholson 10
  24. beauty 58
  25. Behrensmeyer, Anna K. 7
  26. Bjarnason, Baldur 8
  27. Blake, William 5
  28. blogging 22
  29. body 11
  30. Boeing, Geoff 7
  31. boredom 9
  32. Botton, Alain de 38
  33. Brand, Stewart 4
  34. Bringhurst, Robert 16
  35. Brooks, Frederick P. 22
  36. Broskoski, Charles 6
  37. brutalism 7
  38. building 16
  39. bureaucracy 12
  40. Burnham, Bo 9
  41. business 15
  42. Byron, Lord 14
  43. Cagan, Marty 8
  44. Calvino, Italo 21
  45. Camus, Albert 13
  46. care 6
  47. Carruth, Shane 15
  48. Cegłowski, Maciej 6
  49. Cervantes, Miguel de 7
  50. chance 11
  51. change 16
  52. Chiang, Ted 4
  53. childhood 6
  54. Chimero, Frank 17
  55. choice 8
  56. cities 51
  57. Clark, Robin 3
  58. Cleary, Thomas 8
  59. Cleary, J.C. 8
  60. code 20
  61. collaboration 18
  62. collections 31
  63. color 23
  64. commonplace 11
  65. communication 31
  66. community 7
  67. complexity 11
  68. connection 24
  69. constraints 25
  70. construction 9
  71. content 9
  72. Corbusier, Le 13
  73. Coyier, Chris 4
  74. craft 66
  75. creativity 59
  76. crime 9
  77. Critchlow, Tom 5
  78. critique 10
  79. Cross, Nigel 12
  80. Cross, Anita Clayburn 10
  81. css 11
  82. culture 13
  83. curiosity 11
  84. cycles 7
  85. Danielewski, Mark Z. 4
  86. darkness 28
  87. Darwin, Will 10
  88. data 8
  89. death 38
  90. Debord, Guy 6
  91. decisions 10
  92. design 131
  93. details 31
  94. Dickinson, Emily 9
  95. Dieste, Eladio 4
  96. discovery 9
  97. doors 7
  98. Dorn, Brandon 11
  99. drawing 23
  100. Drucker, Peter F. 15
  101. Duany, Andres 18
  102. Eatock, Daniel 4
  103. economics 13
  104. efficiency 7
  105. Eisenman, Peter 8
  106. Eliot, T.S. 14
  107. emotion 8
  108. ending 14
  109. engineering 11
  110. Eno, Brian 4
  111. ethics 14
  112. euphony 38
  113. Evans, Benedict 4
  114. evolution 9
  115. experience 14
  116. farming 8
  117. fashion 11
  118. features 25
  119. feedback 6
  120. flaws 10
  121. Flexner, Abraham 8
  122. food 16
  123. form 19
  124. Fowler, Martin 4
  125. Franklin, Ursula M. 30
  126. friendship 6
  127. fun 7
  128. function 31
  129. games 13
  130. gardens 26
  131. Garfield, Emily 4
  132. Garfunkel, Art 6
  133. geography 8
  134. geometry 18
  135. goals 9
  136. Gombrich, E. H. 4
  137. goodness 12
  138. Graham, Paul 37
  139. graphics 13
  140. Greene, Erick 6
  141. Hamming, Richard 45
  142. happiness 17
  143. Harford, Tim 4
  144. Harper, Thomas J. 15
  145. Hayes, Brian 28
  146. heat 7
  147. Heinrich, Bernd 7
  148. Herbert, Frank 4
  149. Heschong, Lisa 27
  150. Hesse, Herman 6
  151. history 13
  152. Hoffman, Yoel 10
  153. Hofstadter, Douglas 6
  154. home 15
  155. Hoy, Amy 4
  156. Hoyt, Ben 5
  157. html 11
  158. Hudlow, Gandalf 4
  159. humanity 16
  160. humor 6
  161. Huxley, Aldous 7
  162. hypermedia 22
  163. i 18
  164. ideas 21
  165. identity 33
  166. images 10
  167. industry 9
  168. information 42
  169. infrastructure 17
  170. innovation 15
  171. interaction 10
  172. interest 10
  173. interfaces 37
  174. intuition 8
  175. invention 10
  176. Irwin, Robert 65
  177. Isaacson, Walter 28
  178. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  179. iteration 13
  180. Ive, Jonathan 6
  181. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  182. Jacobs, Jane 54
  183. Jacobs, Alan 5
  184. Jobs, Steve 20
  185. Jones, Nick 5
  186. Kahn, Louis 4
  187. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
  188. Kaufman, Kenn 4
  189. Keith, Jeremy 6
  190. Keller, Jenny 10
  191. Keqin, Yuanwu 8
  192. Ketheswaran, Pirijan 6
  193. Kingdon, Jonathan 5
  194. Kitching, Roger 7
  195. Klein, Laura 4
  196. Kleon, Austin 13
  197. Klinkenborg, Verlyn 24
  198. Klyn, Dan 20
  199. knowledge 29
  200. Kohlstedt, Kurt 12
  201. Kramer, Karen L. 10
  202. Krishna, Golden 10
  203. Kuma, Kengo 18
  204. language 20
  205. learning 30
  206. life 59
  207. light 31
  208. loneliness 12
  209. love 26
  210. Lovell, Sophie 16
  211. Lupton, Ellen 11
  212. Luu, Dan 8
  213. Lynch, Kevin 12
  214. MacIver, David R. 8
  215. MacWright, Tom 5
  216. Magnus, Margaret 12
  217. making 77
  218. management 14
  219. Manaugh, Geoff 27
  220. Markson, David 16
  221. Mars, Roman 13
  222. material 39
  223. math 16
  224. McCarter, Robert 21
  225. meaning 33
  226. media 16
  227. melancholy 52
  228. memory 29
  229. metaphor 10
  230. metrics 19
  231. microsites 49
  232. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  233. Mills, C. Wright 9
  234. minimalism 10
  235. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  236. Mod, Craig 15
  237. modularity 6
  238. Mollison, Bill 31
  239. morality 8
  240. Murakami, Haruki 21
  241. music 16
  242. Müller, Boris 7
  243. Naka, Toshiharu 8
  244. names 11
  245. Naskrecki, Piotr 5
  246. nature 51
  247. networks 15
  248. Neustadter, Scott 3
  249. Noessel, Christopher 7
  250. notetaking 35
  251. novelty 11
  252. objects 16
  253. order 10
  254. ornament 9
  255. Orwell, George 7
  256. Ott, Matthias 4
  257. ownership 6
  258. Pallasmaa, Juhani 41
  259. Palmer, John 8
  260. patterns 11
  261. Patton, James L. 9
  262. Pawson, John 21
  263. perception 22
  264. perfection 7
  265. performance 17
  266. Perrine, John D. 9
  267. Petroski, Henry 24
  268. philosophy 6
  269. photography 20
  270. physics 6
  271. Pinker, Steven 8
  272. place 14
  273. planning 15
  274. Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth 18
  275. poetry 13
  276. politics 9
  277. Pollan, Michael 6
  278. practice 10
  279. problems 31
  280. process 22
  281. production 7
  282. productivity 12
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  284. programming 9
  285. progress 16
  286. Pye, David 42
  287. quality 26
  288. questions 8
  289. Radić, Smiljan 20
  290. Rams, Dieter 16
  291. Rao, Venkatesh 14
  292. reading 16
  293. reality 13
  294. Reichenstein, Oliver 5
  295. religion 11
  296. Rendle, Robin 12
  297. repair 28
  298. research 17
  299. Reveal, James L. 4
  300. Richards, Melanie 3
  301. Richie, Donald 10
  302. Rougeux, Nicholas 4
  303. Rowe, Peter G. 10
  304. Rupert, Dave 4
  305. Ruskin, John 5
  306. Satyal, Parimal 9
  307. Saval, Nikil 13
  308. Sayers, Dorothy 32
  309. Schaller, George B. 7
  310. Schwulst, Laurel 5
  311. science 17
  312. seeing 36
  313. Sennett, Richard 45
  314. senses 11
  315. Seuss, Dr. 14
  316. Shakespeare, William 4
  317. Shorin, Toby 8
  318. silence 9
  319. Silverstein, Murray 33
  320. Simms, Matthew 19
  321. Simon, Paul 6
  322. simplicity 14
  323. Singer, Ryan 12
  324. skill 17
  325. Sloan, Robin 5
  326. Smith, Cyril Stanley 29
  327. Smith, Justin E. H. 6
  328. Smith, Rach 4
  329. socializing 7
  330. society 23
  331. software 68
  332. solitude 12
  333. Somers, James 8
  334. Sorkin, Michael 56
  335. sound 14
  336. space 20
  337. Speck, Jeff 18
  338. spirit 10
  339. streets 10
  340. structure 13
  341. Strunk, William 15
  342. Ström, Matthew 13
  343. style 30
  344. Sun, Chuánqí 15
  345. symbols 12
  346. systems 18
  347. Sōetsu, Yanagi 34
  348. Sōseki, Natsume 8
  349. Tanaka, Tomoyuki 9
  350. Tanizaki, Jun'ichirō 15
  351. taste 10
  352. Taylor, Dorian 16
  353. teaching 21
  354. teamwork 17
  355. technology 41
  356. texture 7
  357. thinking 31
  358. Thoreau, Henry David 8
  359. time 54
  360. Tolkien, J.R.R. 6
  361. tools 32
  362. touch 8
  363. transportation 16
  364. Trombley, Nick 44
  365. truth 15
  366. Tufte, Edward 31
  367. Turrell, James 6
  368. typography 25
  369. understanding 32
  370. urbanism 68
  371. ux 100
  372. Victor, Bret 9
  373. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 4
  374. vision 7
  375. visualization 34
  376. Voltaire 4
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  379. Wallace, David Foster 33
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  383. Watterson, Bill 4
  384. Webb, Matt 14
  385. Webb, Marc 3
  386. Weber, Michael H. 3
  387. Wechler, Lawrence 37
  388. whimsy 11
  389. White, E.B. 15
  390. Wirth, Niklaus 6
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The Nature of Beauty

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  • If you have to do tedious work

    If you have to stand somewhere doing tedious work, at least make it interesting.

    Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture
    1. ​​Useless work on useful things​​
    • beauty
    • work
    • boredom
  • I died for beauty

    I died for beauty, but was scarce
    Adjusted in the tomb,
    When one who died for truth was lain
    In an adjoining room.

    He questioned softly why I failed?
    "For beauty," I replied.
    "And I for truth, — the two are one;
    We brethren are," he said.

    Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
    • beauty
    • truth
  • On beauty bare

    Even more than Euclid, hath Euler gazed on beauty bare.

    Structure, Substructure, and Superstructure
    • math
    • beauty

    Referring to the Euler characteristic.

  • The Abode of Vacancy

    The term, "Abode of Vacancy," besides conveying the Taoist theory of the all-containing, involves the conception of a continued need of change in decorative motives. The tea room is absolutely empty, except for what may be placed there temporarily to satisfy some aesthetic mood. Some special art object is brought in for the occasion, and everything else is selected and arranged to enhance the beauty of the principal theme. One cannot listen to different pieces of music at the same time, a real comprehension of the beautiful being possible only through concentration upon some central motive.

    Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
    • beauty
  • The Abode of the Unsymmetrical

    The decoration of our classical interiors was decidedly regular in its arrangement. The Taoist and Zen conception of perfection, however, was different. The dynamic nature of their philosophy laid more stress upon the process through which perfection was sought than upon perfection itself. True beauty could be discovered only by one who mentally completed the incomplete. The virility of life and art lay in its possibilities for growth. In the tea room it is left for each guest in imagination to complete the total effect in relation to himself. Since Zennism has become the prevailing mode of thought, the art of the extreme Orient has purposely avoided the symmetrical as expressing not only completion, but repetition.

    Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
    1. ​​Beauty and compression​​
    • perfection
    • beauty
  • He only who has lived with the beautiful

    He only who has lived with the beautiful can die beautifully. The last moments of the great tea masters were as full of exquisite refinement as had been their lives. Seeking always to be in harmony with the great rhythm of the universe, they were ever prepared to enter the unknown.

    Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea
    1. ​​Japanese Death Poems​​
    2. ​​Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die​​
    • death
    • beauty
  • The core assertion

    Sitting there in the Whitney's coffee shop, Irwin pointed through the glass wall up at the play of shadows on a building facade across the street. "That the light strikes a certain wall at a particular time of day in a particular way and it's beautiful," he commented, "that, as far as I'm concerned, now fits all my criteria for art."

    At the terminus of Irwin's trajectory, when all the nonessentials had been stripped away, came the core assertion that aesthetic perception itself was the pure subject of art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing.

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    1. ​​The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music​​
    • beauty
    • art
  • Restrained beauty

    Braun design had a beauty that was more than skin deep. It would be wrong to say that because the Braun approach spurned fashion in an ongoing quest for functional and useable perfection, it ended up with this beauty by accident. There is a very strong aesthetic sense in both the proportion and materials of nearly all the products of the Rams era. They have a ‘restrained beauty’, he admits.

    Braun products designed by Rams and his team have a haptic aesthetic as well: when you pick them up, handle them, and use them as the tools they are supposed to be, you become aware of the effort that has gone into making them sit comfortably in the hand, of the texture, weight and balance they possess, and of the satisfying click of the control buttons.

    Sophie Lovell & Dieter Rams, Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible
    1. ​​Such an unholy alliance​​
    • beauty
    • touch
    • texture
  • A sense reflected in the plans

    image.png

    When a space resonates with our humanity, when it feels really pleasant or splendid and beautiful—when you place yourself in such an environment, I've always believed that people will be drawn in. So I guess you could say it's this sense that I try to reflect in the plans; I believe that this will lead in the right direction, to an honest lifestyle.

    Akinori Abo, Kigumi House
    1. ​​When our forces are resolved​​
    • craft
    • beauty
    • place
    • humanity
  • A world with pyramids

    Which would you choose—
    a world with pyramids,
    or a world without?

    Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises
    • beauty
    • evil
  • White cloth

    I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, diffy, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth. Because anytime you set some detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its true stature as an object of attention.

    Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
    1. ​​Dwelling in ritual​​
    2. ​​Drawing a frame​​
    • beauty
    • flaws
  • Ordinariness

    We have a habit of thinking that the deepest insights, the most mystical, and spiritual insights, are somehow less ordinary than most things - that they are extraordinary.

    In fact, the opposite is true: the most mystical, most religious, most wonderful – these are not less ordinary than most things – they are more ordinary than most things. And it is because they are so ordinary, indeed, that they strike to the core.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    1. ​​The natural thing to do​​
    • beauty
    • spirit
  • To deprecate beauty itself

    One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.

    Yanagi Sōetsu, Washi
    • paper
    • writing
    • beauty
    • life
  • A Painted Karatsu as Food for Thought

    Screen Shot 2020-12-28 at 4_42_50 PM.png

    Recently there is a tendency to pursue distortion in art, but in the case of this jar, natural deformation has raised distortion to the level of spontaneous beauty.

    Yanagi Sōetsu, The Beauty of Everyday Things
    • art
    • beauty
    • imperfections
  • That one thing against another creates

    Such is our way of thinking—we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.

    Jun'ichirō Tanizaki & Thomas J. Harper, In Praise of Shadows
    • beauty
  • If I can't be beautiful

    Howl: I give up...I see no point in living if I can't be beautiful.

    Hayao Miyazaki, Howl's Moving Castle
    • beauty
  • A grave and noble beauty

    An architecture of our own age is slowly but surely shaping itself; its main lines become more and more evident. The use of steel and reinforced concrete construction; of large areas of plate glass; of standardized units (as, for example, in metal windows); of the flat roof; of new synthetic materials and new surface treatments of metals that machinery made possible; of hints taken from the airplane, the motor-car or the steamship where it was never possible, from the beginning, to attack the problem from an academic standpoint—all these things are helping, at any rate, to produce a twentieth-century architecture whose lineaments are already clearly traceable. A certain squareness of mass and outline, a criss-cross or “grid-iron” treatment with an emphasis on the horizontals, an extreme bareness of wall surface, a pervading austerity and economy and a minimum of ornament; these are among its characteristics. There is evolving, we may begin to suppose, a grave and classical architecture whose fully developed expression should be of a noble beauty.

    Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture
    • beauty
  • How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths

    Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
    1. ​​A World Where Things Only Almost Meet​​
    • labyrinths
    • algorithms
    • beauty
    • process
  • Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, 1959–65

    Salk Institute.jpeg

    Via Evgeny Yorobe Photography.

    If you are there at sunset, as are the scientists every day, you see the most magical of transformations: the golden glow that fills the sky to the west is first reflected in the water of the ocean and then shoots like a line of fire up through the gathering darkness of the plaza's stone floor, to reach its source in the cubic fountain. The court is breathtaking in its sublime power, opening at the edge of the continent to the Pacific Ocean and framing the light blue-on-dark-blue horizon line of the sea and sky.

    Louis Kahn, Understanding Architecture
    • architecture
    • light
    • beauty
  • The Caspian

    The Caspian has its realms of sand,
    Its other realm of sea;
    Without the sterile perquisite
    No Caspian could be.

    Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
    • beauty
    • balance
  • The quality of the day

    It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

    Henry David Thoreau, Walden
    1. ​​Suburban Nation​​
    • ux
    • art
    • morality
    • beauty
  • The quality without a name

    There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.

    There are words we use to describe this quality:

    alive
    whole
    comfortable
    free
    exact
    egoless
    eternal

    But in spite of every effort to give this quality a name, there is no single name which captures it.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    1. ​​No words to describe​​
    • beauty
    • life
    • meaning
    • spirit
  • Fucking up the world

    81d5e7773e33b2edf53cf17b50b291f9.jpg

    City Hall by Rafael Moneo, Logroño, La Rioja, Spain.

    Alexander : At least my experience tells me, that when a group of different people set out to try and find out what is harmonious, what feels most comfortable in such and such a situation, their opinions about it will tend to converge, if they are mocking up full-scale, real stuff. Of course, if they're making sketches or throwing out ideas, they won't agree. But if you start making the real thing, one tends to reach agreement. My only concern is to produce that kind of harmony.

    The thing that strikes me about your friend's building – if I understood you correctly – is that somehow in some intentional way it is not harmonious. That is, Moneo intentionally wants to produce an effect of disharmony. Maybe even of incongruity.

    Eisenman: That is correct.

    Eisenman: I find that incomprehensible. I find it very irresponsible. I find it nutty. I feel sorry for the man. I also feel incredibly angry because he is fucking up the world.

    Christopher Alexander & Peter Eisenman, Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture
    1. ​​Forces of conflict​​
    • beauty
  • It will not stand still to be pointed at

    The cause of the experience of beauty is a series of events, not a state of affairs existing continuously. That perhaps is why the cause of the experience is something we find impossible to point out. It will not stand still to be pointed at. We can point out only what we perceive. We can never point out or describe what we see.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​Time and space​​
    • beauty
    • perception
    • seeing
  • A curious fact

    Is it not a curious fact that in a world steeped in irrational hatreds which threaten civilization itself, men and women — old and young — detach themselves wholly or partly from the angry current of daily life to devote themselves to the cultivation of beauty, to the extension of knowledge, to the cure of disease, to the amelioration of suffering, just as though fanatics were not simultaneously engaged in spreading pain, ugliness, and suffering? The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place — yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them. From a practical point of view, intellectual and spiritual life is, on the surface, a useless form of activity, in which men indulge because they procure for themselves greater satisfactions than are otherwise obtainable.

    Abraham Flexner, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
    • beauty
  • Some emptiness in us

    Whenever we encounter beauty we become aware, each time with a sense of shock and pleasure, faint though it may be, that some emptiness in us, not consciously felt but continually present, has been assuaged and fulfilled. We have a sudden high sense of completeness and harmony.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​The Timeless Way of Building​​
    • beauty
  • The matrix of all we know

    Man's species has existed for an immensely longer period, unimaginably longer, in an unmodified natural environment. That unmodified environment was the matrix of all man knows of beauty. All the means of his experience of beauty evolved in it. Now, in the artificial environment, art creates an equivalent for that beauty, for it is a need of man's spirit.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • beauty
  • Who did the teaching, then?

    It has been contended sometimes that our response to works of art is entirely learnt and in no way innate; but the questions 'Who did the teaching, then? and how?' have not, I fancy, been much investigated. This contention is very true of our responses to styles and fashions, but it is not true of our response to beauty.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • style
    • beauty
    • fashion

    Environment teaches fashion.
    Culture teaches style.
    Nature teaches beauty.

  • No kind

    No kind of shape, no kind of design or kind of picture or other work of art can be beautiful. No kind of color is beautiful. Beauty comes always from the singularity of things. Two things which happen to be closely similar in size, color, insurance value, smell, weight, or shape, may both seem equally beautiful. It is not therefore to be deduced that, say, a smell of turpentine is a necessary prerequisite of beauty; and nor is the fact that the two things' shapes are measurably within a millimeter of each other. They might still be as different as chalk and cheese: they might differ hugely in surface quality so that one lived and the other was dead. One judges a man by what he is, by his individuality, his idiosyncrasy; not by his measurable properties or measurable behavior or by the shape of his nose or the description in his passport. So with a work of art.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​The Timeless Way of Building​​
    • beauty

    A thing is not beautiful merely for belonging to a category of things in a particular style. Only individual objects are beautiful, not styles.

    The reference to living and dead objects has a kind of Alexandrian phraseology.

  • Ideas of a good life

    In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of visions of happiness.

    To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase, and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.

    Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
    • architecture
    • beauty
  • Inwardly to resemble

    What we want, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

    We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient.

    Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
    • beauty
  • The extremes of order and complexity

    Such works emphasize the truth of the ancient maxim that beauty lies between the extremes of order and complexity.

    It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word ‘beautiful’, alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled.

    Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
    • beauty
  • Beauty and strength

    Yet the bridge testifies to how closely a certain kind of beauty is bound up with our admiration for strength, for man-made objects which can withstand the life-destroying forces of heat, cold, gravity or wind.

    We respond with emotion to creations which transport us across distances we could never walk, which shelter us during storms we could not weather, which pick up signals we could never hear with our own ears and which hang daintily off cliffs from which we would fall instantly to our deaths.

    Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
    • beauty
  • With grace and economy

    Both bridges accomplish daring feats, but Maillart’s possesses the added virtue of making its achievement look effortless - and because we sense it isn’t, we wonder at it and admire it all the more. The bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance - holding, spanning, sheltering - with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted.

    Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
    • beauty
  • Needs more love

    He held the phone to his chest, looked at me, and simply said, “Needs more love.” He pushed the portfolio back across his desk, smiled warmly, and shooed me out of his office.

    I still think about this advice, and what exactly he might have meant when he said my work needed more love. At the time, I took it to mean that I should improve my craft, but I’ve come to realize that he was speaking of something more fundamental and vital. My work was flat, because it was missing the spark that comes from creating something you believe in for someone you care about. This is the source of the highest craft, because an affection for the audience produces the care necessary to make the work well.

    Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
    • beauty
    • making
  • We hear a voice whisper

    The Shakers have a proverb that says, “Do not make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both, do not hesitate to make it beautiful.” We all believe that design’s primary job is to be useful. Our minds say that so long as the design works well, the work’s appearance does not necessarily matter. And yet, our hearts say otherwise. No matter how rational our thinking, we hear a voice whisper that beauty has an important role to play.

    Frank Chimero, The Shape of Design
    • beauty
    • design
  • Praise has no part in it

    Everything that is in any way beautiful is beautiful of itself and complete in itself, and praise has no part in it; for nothing comes to be better or worse for being praised.

    Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
    • beauty
  • When a building has this fire

    And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety, created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • beauty
    • nature
    • architecture
  • The gate

    To reach the quality without a name we must build a living pattern language as a gate.

    Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
    • beauty
  • True artistry

    The best of all examples of a satisfactory art form based upon the inner nature of a metal is provided by Japanese swords.

    Our perception of beauty seems to involve the interaction of several patterns having origin and significance at many different levels of space, time, matter, and spirit. In the Japanese sword blade there is heterogeneity in both the macrostructure and the microstructure. The manner of forging, the heat treatment, and the final polishing operation are all uniquely Japanese techniques, and all make necessary contributions to the final quality of the blades. The shape along would be simplistic form; the forged texture of the steel without heat treatment would at best faintly echo the beauty of grained wood; the outlines of the quench-hardened zone at the edge would be sharp and uninteresting if it depended only on the control of cooling rate during quenching; and the polish would be uniform glitter if the metal were homogeneous. With true artistry all these are made to interact.

    Cyril Stanley Smith, A Search for Structure
    • beauty
    • craft
  • What we are accustomed to call beautiful

    Most objects which we are accustomed to call beautiful, such as a painting or a tree, are single-purpose things, in which, through long development or the impress of one will, there is an intimate, visible linkage from fine detail to total structure.

    Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City
    • beauty
    • objects
    • structure
  • Grace

    Grace: you work and you work and you work at something that then happens of its own accord. It would not have happened without all that work, but the result cannot be accounted for as the product of the work in the sense that an effect is said to be the product of its causes. There is all that preparation—preparation for receptivity—and then there is something else beyond that, which is gratis, for free.

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    • beauty
  • The Timeless Way of Building

    A Book by Christopher Alexander
    www.patternlanguage.com
    1. ​​Mind of no mind​​
    2. ​​The quality without a name​​
    3. ​​An objective matter​​
    4. ​​Bitterness​​
    5. ​​The most precious thing we ever have​​
    1. ​​Some emptiness in us​​
    2. ​​Deliberate acts​​
    3. ​​No kind​​
    4. ​​patternsof.design​​
    5. ​​A Pattern Language​​
    6. ​​Non-architects​​
    7. ​​The Side View #17: Susan Ingham & Chris Andrews​​
    8. ​​The usages of life​​
    • architecture
    • making
    • building
    • urbanism
    • beauty
    • construction
    • zen
  • The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth

    A Book by Christopher Alexander
    www.goodreads.com
    1. ​​Two generating systems​​
    2. ​​Two types of building production​​
    3. ​​System A​​
    4. ​​System B​​
    5. ​​This has harmed modern society greatly​​
    1. ​​What the prototype tells you​​
    2. ​​On the "Building" of Software and Websites​​
    3. ​​Back to the Drawing Board​​
    4. ​​Reading the landscape​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • beauty
    • construction

    A struggle between two world-systems.

  • Chef's Table

    A Documentary
    www.netflix.com
    1. ​​Chef's Table: Jeong Kwan​​
    • food
    • craft
    • beauty
  • The Nature and Aesthetics of Design

    A Book by David Pye
    books.google.com
    1. ​​Any imaginable shape​​
    2. ​​Useless work on useful things​​
    3. ​​Presentable​​
    4. ​​The principle of arrangement​​
    5. ​​The minimum condition​​
    1. ​​More real than living man​​
    2. ​​That which requires caring​​
    3. ​​The informing idea of functionalism​​
    • design
    • aesthetics
    • making
    • style
    • craft
    • beauty
  • Einmal Ist Keinmal

    An Article by Dan Klyn
    blog.usejournal.com
    1. ​​Jacked in​​
    2. ​​Immer wieder​​
    3. ​​But what if it is?​​
    1. ​​104. Site Repair​​
    2. ​​66. Holy Ground​​
    3. ​​109. Long Thin House​​
    4. ​​135. Tapestry of Light and Dark​​
    5. ​​239. Small Panes​​
    • beauty
    • craft
    • making
    • design
    • architecture
  • The Nature of Order

    A Book by Christopher Alexander
    www.natureoforder.com
    1. ​​Levels of Scale​​
    2. ​​Strong Centers​​
    3. ​​Boundaries​​
    4. ​​Alternating Repetition​​
    5. ​​Positive Space​​
    1. ​​Strength from both mass and form​​
    • architecture
    • urbanism
    • goodness
    • beauty
  • AI-art isn’t art

    An Essay by Erik Hoel
    erikhoel.substack.com

    AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful.

    …Just as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldn’t tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art.

    • art
    • consciousness
    • beauty
    • meaning
    • ai
  • Good Things

    A Website by Melanie Richards
    goodthings.melanie-richards.com
    1. ​​If I had The Sads​​
    1. ​​Thanks Doc​​
    • beauty
    • life
    • happiness
    • microsites
    • collections

    A personal compilation of good sensory things in life.

  • Against the survival of the prettiest

    An Essay by Samuel Hughes
    www.worksinprogress.co

    What has emerged here is that although survivorship bias probably does contribute to that to some extent, it is not the main explanation: premodern buildings may on average have been a bit less beautiful than those that have survived, but they still seem to have been ugly far less often than recent buildings are.

    The survivorship theory sought to explain the apparent rise of ugliness in terms of a bias in the sample of buildings we are observing. There is another kind of bias theory, which seeks to explain it in terms of a bias in the observer, saying for instance that every generation is disposed to find recent buildings uglier than older ones, and that this is why recent buildings seem so to us. This is a complex and interesting idea, which I am not going to assess on this occasion. Suppose, though, that our eyes are to be trusted. If this is so, strange and eerie truths rise before us: that ugly buildings were once rare, that the ‘uglification of the world’ is real and that it is happening all around us.

    • urbanism
    • architecture
    • beauty
  • In search of visual texture

    An Article by Rachel Prudden
    obliqueville.substack.com
    3C7AC130-F9E3-4569-BF32-E977C3DDD6B8.png

    I’m now more inclined to attribute Looseleaf’s power to its visual texture than to some cognitive media-style abstraction. And the visual texture owes more to the beauty (yes, beauty!) of the original pdfs from the Vasulka Archive. Perhaps the demo is best understood not as a prototype generic tool, but as a specific curated experience in its own right, with form and content claiming equal importance in its overall success.

    Even so, I think there are some general lessons that can be drawn from this demo:

    • Content is not inert
    • Visual texture lets content breathe
    • Visual texture lets the eye wander without losing itself
    1. ​​Looseleaf​​
    • texture
    • typography
    • beauty
    • interfaces
    • visualization
  • Beauty and compression

    An Article by Scott Alexander
    astralcodexten.substack.com

    The Buddha discusses states of extreme bliss attainable through meditation:

    Secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters and dwells in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by thought and examination, with rapture and happiness born of seclusion.

    ...If you could really concentrate on a metronome, it would be more blissful than a symphony. The jhāna is also a strong contender as a theory of beauty: beauty is that which is compressible but has not already been compressed.

    1. ​​The Abode of the Unsymmetrical​​
    • beauty
    • silence
    • senses
    • attention

    Edited from original text for brevity.

  • How the light gets in

    A Quote by Leonard Cohen

    There is a crack in everything.
    That's how the light gets in.

    • flaws
    • light
    • beauty
    • wabi-sabi
    • repair
  • The Side View #17: Susan Ingham & Chris Andrews

    An Episode
    thesideview.co

    In this episode, we talk about the work of architect, builder, and design theorist Christopher Alexander. Joining us are two of Alexander’s former students, Susan Ingham and Chris Andrews. They talk about their philosophy of architecture and their program, Building Beauty, which offers a post-graduate diploma in architecture based around Alexander's ideas.

    1. ​​The Timeless Way of Building​​
    • architecture
    • beauty
  • Beauty in flight

    A Quote
    paulgraham.com

    All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked beautiful would fly the same way.

    — Ben Rich, Skunk Works

    1. ​​I choose a world with pyramids​​
    2. ​​Taste for Makers​​
    • beauty
    • function
    • flight
  • Taste for Makers

    An Essay by Paul Graham
    paulgraham.com

    If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an airy abstraction, to be either blathered about or avoided depending on how one feels about airy abstractions, let's try considering it as a practical question: how do you make good stuff?

    1. ​​You feel this when you start to design things​​
    2. ​​Good design is simple​​
    3. ​​Good design is timeless​​
    4. ​​Good design is often slightly funny​​
    5. ​​Good design is hard, but looks easy​​
    1. ​​Beauty in flight​​
    • beauty
    • taste
    • design
  • butdoesitfloat

    A Blog
    butdoesitfloat.com
    Screenshot of butdoesitfloat.com on 2020-09-03 at 2.52.47 PM.png
    • art
    • beauty
    • graphics
    • photography

    Updated rarely (if at all) these days, but one of the most well-curated, gorgeous blogs I've ever come across.


See also:
  1. architecture
  2. craft
  3. art
  4. making
  5. design
  6. urbanism
  7. life
  8. meaning
  9. spirit
  10. texture
  11. flaws
  12. style
  13. light
  14. construction
  15. touch
  16. perception
  17. seeing
  18. fashion
  19. nature
  20. objects
  21. structure
  22. food
  23. happiness
  24. microsites
  25. collections
  26. aesthetics
  27. goodness
  28. building
  29. zen
  30. truth
  31. balance
  32. ux
  33. morality
  34. labyrinths
  35. algorithms
  36. process
  37. graphics
  38. photography
  39. work
  40. boredom
  41. function
  42. flight
  43. taste
  44. imperfections
  45. paper
  46. writing
  47. wabi-sabi
  48. repair
  49. evil
  50. place
  51. humanity
  52. silence
  53. senses
  54. attention
  55. perfection
  56. death
  57. math
  58. typography
  59. interfaces
  60. visualization
  61. consciousness
  62. ai
  1. Christopher Alexander
  2. David Pye
  3. Alain de Botton
  4. Okakura Kakuzō
  5. Frank Chimero
  6. Lawrence Wechler
  7. Robert Irwin
  8. Emily Dickinson
  9. Hayao Miyazaki
  10. Yanagi Sōetsu
  11. Marcus Aurelius
  12. Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
  13. Thomas J. Harper
  14. Sophie Lovell
  15. Dieter Rams
  16. Nicholson Baker
  17. Peter Eisenman
  18. Abraham Flexner
  19. Cyril Stanley Smith
  20. Louis Kahn
  21. Kevin Lynch
  22. Dan Klyn
  23. Melanie Richards
  24. Henry David Thoreau
  25. Umberto Eco
  26. Le Corbusier
  27. Bill Mollison
  28. Paul Graham
  29. Leonard Cohen
  30. Akinori Abo
  31. Scott Alexander
  32. Rachel Prudden
  33. Samuel Hughes
  34. Erik Hoel