Beauty and Quality

Patterns can be lenses. They can guide and amplify the process of using your senses for new solutions. They can help you better determine whether the foundations you are forming are promising or poisonous. This sense of the quality of our solutions is intrinsic in us. It senses what Christopher Alexander called the ‘quality without a name’.

Throughout Christopher Alexander’s research, there’s a thread of something that, at first glance, seems to break with science and rational thought. The architect put up many buildings, so when you first learn about his ideas of using feelings and instinct to make highly consequential decisions, you are left confused. On the one hand, here is someone who devoted their life to constructing buildings that withstand the strictest regulations and environmental constraints. And yet, his core thesis relies on human instinct and emotional responses.

We have been taught that there is no objective difference between good buildings and bad, good towns and bad.

The fact is that the difference between a good building and a bad building, between a good town and a bad town, is an objective matter. It is the difference between health and sickness, wholeness and dividedness, self-maintenance and self-destruction. In a world which is healthy, whole, alive, and self-maintaining, people themselves can be alive and self-creating. In a world which is unwhole and self-destroying, people cannot be alive: they will inevitably themselves be self-destroying, and miserable.

But it is easy to understand why people believe so firmly that there is no single, solid basis for the difference between good building and bad.

It happens because the single central quality which makes the difference cannot be named.

— Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building[TTWoB79], p. 25.

In The Timeless Way of Building, he uses the term ‘quality without a name’ to describe what he sees in the best buildings. In other books, he describes the quality as that found in the smiling of a face, not the face or the smile itself, but the moment of reacting with one. It’s never the building but how it sits in its environment. It’s hardly ever a thing in any sense, but it’s always about configuration in reaction to a context. The quality without a name identifies attributes of relationships more than of the elements alone. But describing it is difficult. Christopher Alexander takes many pages to explain it.

It is never twice the same, because it always takes its shape from the particular place in which it occurs. […] It is a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions.

The word which we most often use to talk about the quality without a name is the word “alive.” […] But the very beauty of the word “alive” is just its weakness.

Another word we often use to talk about the quality without a name is “whole.” […] But the word “whole” is too enclosed.

— Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building[TTWoB79], pp. 26, 29–31.

He lists other words—comfortable, free, exact, egoless, and eternal—but in the end, admits that no single name captures it. The quality is well-described by these words, but it took me multiple readings to grasp the concept fully.

More concerning is how this sense of quality is easily disturbed. We overrule it with our logic, preferences, history, or societal norms. It’s easier to ignore the sense than use it, which is why it took Christopher Alexander such a long time[NoO1-01] to find the right way to express the questions he used to provoke responses employing it. The question, then, is, why did he feel the need to provoke it in the first place?

The quality without a name is that which you detect when the environment is in harmony. The detection is personal, but it is universal in that every individual will be just a little more comfortable and less stressed than if the surroundings deviated from that equilibrium. An environment extremely alien to us, not fabricated by dissimilar humans with different tastes, but outside our sense of normal or regular, sometimes it feels natural and safe. That almost animal-like feeling of goodness in the moment is our instinct telling us the world is okay. Stay like this. We find it in places, objects, people, and communities. And everyone has this sense, and this sense is, for the vast majority, aligned across humanity.

Christopher Alexander ran an experiment that often goes by the name ‘the paper strip experiment’¹. In the experiment, he presented a set of paper strips of seven segments, where each segment was painted either black or white. Every permutation of three black segments was present among the 35 strips.

Over a series of tests designed to determine the perceptual complexity of each of the strips, Alexander had found evidence of an overall ordering. The test results were highly correlated even though each test was quite different in design from all the rest. Without planning for it, he had made a series of tests which where the least inviting to the ego and most aligned with intrinsic feeling.

The tests revealed an empirical order to complexity, but it also revealed something else. After working with the results for some time², Christopher Alexander deduced the wholesomeness and simplicity of these very abstract artefacts came down to a property he had seen in many wholesome architecture projects. The property of sub-symmetries, later formalised to local symmetries, which I go into more detail on in the next chapter.

The quality without a name has many aspects. This was likely the first one recognised and rationalised by Alexander and his team. It’s a property of most wholesome objects. It was a great discovery, one of many to come. The aspects were developed into the properties, transformations, and sequences of unfoldings described in Christopher Alexander’s largest work, The Nature of Order[NoO1-01]. However, for now, we need to concentrate on two questions about the quality without a name. Surprisingly, they have the same answer. Why is this subtle sense so fragile? And why do we all have the same sense of it? To answer this, we must take a path through the world of beauty.