Noticing Birds
I'll be writing over here for a while, on expanding ideas from Christopher Alexander into experience. This is a short preview of what I'll be doing. If this sounds interesting, subscribe on Substack.
My wife loves birds. She’ll notice some new guest to our yard, and if she can’t immediately identify them, will run to the bird guidebook. I recently built a way to appreciate them more.
In some ways, birds entirely coexist. They aren’t all that inhibited from entering our outdoor spaces, and we’re not bothered. Where I live, they’re almost always around. Right now I can hear a Cordilleran Flycatcher who has taken up residence in a tree outside my office.
This newsletter isn’t actually about birds. It’s about the texture of noticing what’s around, the dynamic interplay that exists when we cease to package the world as we usually do. But that sounds lofty and stuffy, at least to me.
My first goal is a bit of a love letter to the philosopher-architect Christopher Alexander. He spent his life noticing buildings, place, people, and beauty. Grappling with what this essence is that emerges everywhere but eludes clear definition, he identified fifteen properties that seem to describe the qualities we may notice.
Levels of scale, strong centers, thick boundaries, alternating repetition, positive space, good shape, local symmetries, deep interlock and ambiguity, contrast, gradients, roughness, echoes, the void, simplicity and inner calm, not-separateness.
Beyond architecture, these properties seem to gesture towards something deeper. I want to explore and dance with how these show up in experience itself.
