- the timeless way is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves, it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we only let it
- must learn discipline and then must shed it
- the quality- to seek the timeless way we must first know 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.
- a building or town which is alive is a world that is healthy, whole, alive, self-maintaining, people themselves can be alive and self-creating.
- if an object is alive, it is like us when we are most free
- the character of a place is given by the events that take place there
the pattern of events
- towns are made up of patterns- shapes of buildings as well as patterns of events which take place there
- the specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alike, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead they keep us locked in inner conflict.
- it is a myth that a person need only to do inner work in order to feel this sense of creativity and of being alive, but this implies that they are entirely self-sufficient and not depended in any essential way on their surroundings
- the fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings- some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life, others make it very difficult
- the quality itself- 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.
- patterns in buildings cannot be modular and alive- nature is not modular
- the fluidity of nature, it's roughness, its irregularity, will not be true, unless it is made in the knowledge that it is going to die
- the character of nature can't arise without the presence and the consciousness of death
- a pattern language gives each person who uses it, the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences
- each pattern is a rule which describes what you have to do to generate the entity which is defines- ex: each barn is 3x the # of cows, contains one aisle with two columns to the side, must face paths -each can be built uniquely but matching basic patterns based on need
- pattern language not only helps the ppl shape their houses, but also helps them shape their streets and town collectively
- a pattern language is a finite system of rules which a person can use to generate an infinite variety of diff buildings, and that the use of lang. will allow the ppl of a village or a town to generate exactly that balance of uniformity and variety which brings a place to life
- you make your designs by using a pattern language
- at the moment when a person is faced with an act of design, he does not have time to think about it from scratch- so he uses known patterns, or combinations of known patterns
- patterns come from language, all ppl share language- although it is more broken up now
- the spirit which the buildings have, their power, their life, comes from teh pattern languages their builders use as well.
- since languages are no longer shared, the processes which keep them deep have broken down: and it is therefore virtually impossible for anybody, in our time, to make a building live
- ppl used to build and share a life tog in a community- they all helped build and understood the concepts of building (why, what it's for, how to do it)- something we've lost
- in panic, people try to replace the lost order of the organic process by artificial forms of order based on control
- to work our way toward a shared and living language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life
- each pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation btw a certain context, a problem, and a solution
- patterns can exist at all scales
- in order to discover patterns which are alive we must always start with observation
- now try to discover some property which is common to all the ones which feel good, and missing from all the ones which don't feel good
- this property will be a highly complex relationship
- sometimes this is found via positive relationships, sometimes via negative ones, sometimes via abstract argument
- it is very hard to be prices, because there is never any one formulation of the pattern which is perfectly exact
- instead, to strike the balance between being too narrow and too loose, you must express and visualize a pattern as a kind of fluid image, a morphological feeling, a swirling intuition about form, which captures the invariant field which is the pattern
- discover fluid fields of relationships
- a pattern is not alive just because its component statements are true, one by one
- even the fact that a pattern seems sensible and has clear reasoning behind it, does not mean at all that the pattern is necessarily capable of generating life
- we must rely on feelings more than intellect
- patterns made from thought, without feeling, lack empirical reality entirely
- by seeming to be unethical, by making no judgments about individual opinions, or goals, or values, the pattern rises to another level of morality
- the language is functionally complete, when the system of patterns it defines is fully capable of allowing all its inner forces to resolve themselves
- it is essential to distinguish those patterns which are the principal components of any given pattern, from those which lie still further down
- each pattern is an operator which differentiates space: that is, it creates distinctions where no distinction was before
- the details of a patter or a building cannot be made alive when they are made from modular parts. In order to be alive they must be imagined first, and then made to fit the terrain.
- when we repair, we assume that we are going to transform it, that new wholes will be born, that, indeed, the entire whole which is being repaired will become a diff whole as the result of the repair
- indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves.
- so paradoxically you learn that you can only make a building live when you are free enough to reject even the very patterns which are helping you
- it is just your pattern language which helps you become egoless
- at the final stage, the patterns are no longer impt: the patterns have taught you to be receptive to what is real
- it is the gate which leads you to the state of mind, in which you live so close to your own heart that you no longer need a language
- shed our fears, to avoid images, methods and concepts
- every person literally born with ability to build things that are alive- but must move past pre-conceived concepts of how to do it- must learn discipline and then must shed it
- the quality- to seek the timeless way we must first know 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.
- a building or town which is alive is a world that is healthy, whole, alive, self-maintaining, people themselves can be alive and self-creating.
- if an object is alive, it is like us when we are most free
- the character of a place is given by the events that take place there
the pattern of events
- our world is made of a structure, a collection of patterned events
- our lives are made up of few patterns- if they are good for me I live well, if they are bad, I can't.- towns are made up of patterns- shapes of buildings as well as patterns of events which take place there
- the specific patterns out of which a building or a town is made may be alive or dead. To the extent they are alike, they let our inner forces loose, and set us free; but when they are dead they keep us locked in inner conflict.
- it is a myth that a person need only to do inner work in order to feel this sense of creativity and of being alive, but this implies that they are entirely self-sufficient and not depended in any essential way on their surroundings
- the fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings- some kinds of physical and social circumstances help a person come to life, others make it very difficult
- the quality itself- 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.
- patterns in buildings cannot be modular and alive- nature is not modular
- the fluidity of nature, it's roughness, its irregularity, will not be true, unless it is made in the knowledge that it is going to die
- the character of nature can't arise without the presence and the consciousness of death
- a pattern language gives each person who uses it, the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings, just as his ordinary language gives him the power to create an infinite variety of sentences
- each pattern is a rule which describes what you have to do to generate the entity which is defines- ex: each barn is 3x the # of cows, contains one aisle with two columns to the side, must face paths -each can be built uniquely but matching basic patterns based on need
- pattern language not only helps the ppl shape their houses, but also helps them shape their streets and town collectively
- a pattern language is a finite system of rules which a person can use to generate an infinite variety of diff buildings, and that the use of lang. will allow the ppl of a village or a town to generate exactly that balance of uniformity and variety which brings a place to life
- you make your designs by using a pattern language
- at the moment when a person is faced with an act of design, he does not have time to think about it from scratch- so he uses known patterns, or combinations of known patterns
- patterns come from language, all ppl share language- although it is more broken up now
- the spirit which the buildings have, their power, their life, comes from teh pattern languages their builders use as well.
- since languages are no longer shared, the processes which keep them deep have broken down: and it is therefore virtually impossible for anybody, in our time, to make a building live
- ppl used to build and share a life tog in a community- they all helped build and understood the concepts of building (why, what it's for, how to do it)- something we've lost
- in panic, people try to replace the lost order of the organic process by artificial forms of order based on control
- to work our way toward a shared and living language once again, we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life
- each pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation btw a certain context, a problem, and a solution
- patterns can exist at all scales
- in order to discover patterns which are alive we must always start with observation
- now try to discover some property which is common to all the ones which feel good, and missing from all the ones which don't feel good
- this property will be a highly complex relationship
- sometimes this is found via positive relationships, sometimes via negative ones, sometimes via abstract argument
- it is very hard to be prices, because there is never any one formulation of the pattern which is perfectly exact
- instead, to strike the balance between being too narrow and too loose, you must express and visualize a pattern as a kind of fluid image, a morphological feeling, a swirling intuition about form, which captures the invariant field which is the pattern
- discover fluid fields of relationships
- a pattern is not alive just because its component statements are true, one by one
- even the fact that a pattern seems sensible and has clear reasoning behind it, does not mean at all that the pattern is necessarily capable of generating life
- we must rely on feelings more than intellect
- patterns made from thought, without feeling, lack empirical reality entirely
- by seeming to be unethical, by making no judgments about individual opinions, or goals, or values, the pattern rises to another level of morality
- the language is functionally complete, when the system of patterns it defines is fully capable of allowing all its inner forces to resolve themselves
- it is essential to distinguish those patterns which are the principal components of any given pattern, from those which lie still further down
- each pattern is an operator which differentiates space: that is, it creates distinctions where no distinction was before
- the details of a patter or a building cannot be made alive when they are made from modular parts. In order to be alive they must be imagined first, and then made to fit the terrain.
- when we repair, we assume that we are going to transform it, that new wholes will be born, that, indeed, the entire whole which is being repaired will become a diff whole as the result of the repair
- indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves.
- so paradoxically you learn that you can only make a building live when you are free enough to reject even the very patterns which are helping you
- it is just your pattern language which helps you become egoless
- at the final stage, the patterns are no longer impt: the patterns have taught you to be receptive to what is real
- it is the gate which leads you to the state of mind, in which you live so close to your own heart that you no longer need a language
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