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Fifteen Fundamental Properties (2022)

by camillovisini on 5/13/24, 6:05 AM with 16 comments

  • by tptacek on 5/14/24, 12:14 AM

    This is derived from Christopher Alexander, who people on HN might be more aware of as the (distant) intellectual progenitor of the pattern language movement (of which the "Gang of Four" Design Patterns are the most familiar incarnation) --- but he himself is an architect; I assume "A Pattern Language" isn't his most important book in his own field, but it's a lot of fun to flip through, and I'm glad I have it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander

  • by rkallos on 5/14/24, 1:11 AM

    These properties are explained in great detail in volume 1 of Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order.

    Reading about these with accompanying images of spaces or objects demonstrating the presence or absence of these properties is what made it stick for me.

  • by digging on 5/14/24, 4:18 PM

    Maybe I'm just too brutish to understand, but this comes across as absurd to me. Willing to be corrected.

    Boundaries as a fundamental property makes sense. Literally all things have boundaries (or, if you prefer, no things have boundaries and we can design the perception of boundaries).

    Thick boundaries is an approach to utilizing the property of boundaries. Thin boundaries exist; they're acknowledged (as "ineffective") in the selfsame paragraph. So Thick Boundaries is not a fundamental property. (Separately, I disagree that thin boundaries are categorically ineffective, unless we're defining thinness in a tautological way - ie. "a boundary so thin that a human can't ordinarily perceive it". But I'm no legendary designer.)

    Engineers get a lot of flack for not having the skills to explain their work in non-technical ways, but I think designers are the worst about it. Concepts will be so abstracted as to be inscrutable, such that a simple statement of a fundamental property comes across as an obviously wrong and foolish statement to an outsider. This abstraction is not a bad thing in and of itself, but you'd think designers of all professions would be better about inclusive presentation - that is, about making their work understood.

    (The introductory paragraph of TFA is actually an unusually clear and useful framing to the content - often such articles don't even both with a lay introduction; but the content, as I stated above, is close to nonsense to me.)

  • by abeppu on 5/13/24, 9:16 PM

    > Objects and buildings feature a hierarchy of centers – distinctive features which attract the spectator's eye.

    I think it's weird to consider the people interacting with buildings as "spectators". Presumably a building serves purposes other than being seen. Though these were posed by an architect, "residents", "occupants", "users" etc are never mentioned -- only "spectators".

  • by xutopia on 5/13/24, 9:03 PM

    This feels like astrology of design. It is just me?