Durango, my home, isn’t pretty. Okay, well, the mountains are. But the town itself is certainly not pristine in the way that a cookie-cutter premium hotel is aesthetically pretty. But it is, obviously, beautiful in a rough, visceral way. There’s this frontier spirit that shows up everywhere. People love the quaint downtown, and they love walking the grid. The local economy is supported by tourism, by people who find something about this space desirable. I sure do. I moved here several years ago on a whim.

In the town’s grid are narrow lots, backing up to alleys. I love walking the alleys. They’re a bit rougher than the streets. In some ways, they feel like little peeks into people’s lives. They’re a bit less clean, a bit more exposed. You can see half-completed projects and little gardens. The bark-y dogs are alley-facing, making sure people not in their pack don’t intrude. The private domain of people’s homes meets public, yet lightly trafficked, space. This weird union makes both stronger. The boundary is there, but porous.

The alleys, even more than Durango itself, are not pretty. Yet, I love them. There’s a simplicity about alleys. They aren’t claiming to be cosmically great. There’s an essence that is utterly delightful. So what is it, exactly, that I’m seeing?

Nothing about this is that strange or unusual. It seems that we don’t actually need a deep story about loving these kinds of alive places. You can probably think of similar places that just exude something that evokes similar delight, places that feel special in a way. We’ll call it “aliveness”, though we could also call it beauty. Neither word feels quite complete.

There’s also places that have none of this, yet are nominally, for what seems like objective purposes, pristine. Think of a staged model home. Everything is clean, the furniture is tasteful. It sits there, as if it’s waiting to be occupied by a family. But it’ll never be occupied, at least not in the way it’s presented. There’s obvious hollowness, because no, no one lives there. In some ways it’s “objectively” nicer than my home or yours. Yet, come on, you can feel the deadness from the doorway.

Many of us have been trained out of this. We walk into a freshly renovated kitchen, feel a flatness, and conclude that something is wrong with us. It’s a lovely kitchen, right? It’s got everything. But that sense caught something. We’ve just learned to override it.

This sense is not limited to space. When you have an hours-long deep conversation with a dear friend, there’s a specialness (could we call this, also, beauty?) in the interaction itself. Together, time sort of disappears. Neither of you is steering, yet the conversation flows. It goes somewhere neither of you could have gone alone. It’s totally unlike talking to yourself. You might leave feeling somehow more like yourself. Or perhaps you’ve noticed it within the relationship you have with loved ones. A long friendship has it, the kind that instantly resumes after long periods of not talking.

We can experience it in ourselves. Working on a project we care about and finishing it. Being of service to others. Creative expression.

Even stretches of time have it, or don’t. Some weeks have a shape to them. They seem as if they build toward something, in a way you can feel while you’re inside it. Other weeks are just a series of identical days. Nothing was wrong with them, exactly. They just weren’t quite... that.

If you sit with these, you’ll notice that detecting this form of beauty seems automatic. We know it when we see it. Or rather, we feel it when we feel it. It’s embodied. Perhaps in some ways it’s not immediately apparent, but it can be obvious. Home feels like home.

It’s as if we have an instrument that’s always on, whose detector arms swing around automatically as we find this quality. We could call it “taste” or “mood”, but is that it? We never really decide any of this. We never turned it on, either. When I walk in the alleys, or tour a model home, the sense has already arrived. Yet notice the trick we often do with these: we file them under “taste” or “mood” and move on. But that filing has never quite fit, for me. I certainly have opinions, and perhaps some of this is also influenced by opinion. But if I pay close attention, it feels more like something that happens to me. Whatever this is, calling it “merely subjective” seems to miss it.

When I say “the alley is alive”, what kind of claim am I making about the world? I hear two different stories. One is that I’m sharing a bit about what I like, in an autobiographical sense. I’m reporting how I feel about it. If you take me away, then everything about this quality is also gone.

But there’s another story. It’s not supernatural, per se. But when I take friends to walk with me in the alley, they can usually sense it too. There’s something, some quality, that seems present. Sort of like how the sky seems blue, the alley has this coupled resonance, between us and it.

The alley’s parts really do hang together in a particular way. There’s the porous boundary, the private life grading into the public lane. If we really notice, we can feel this structure becoming apparent. But it’s even more vivid after one of those hours-long conversations with a friend. We both experienced it. The essence sat in the relationship itself, somewhere between us. In fact, if we didn’t both feel it, it’d be jarring!

It’s actually helpful if we don’t try to rationalize this, which we could do. Instead, this essence has this obviousness about it. Our culture defaults to a view that measurements are about the world, feelings are about the feeler. Again, I don’t think that split holds. The wrongness I feel in a half-ass apology is, in a strange way, in the relationship between the apology and me. The feeling is how the detection shows up, not what’s being detected.

So it seems there’s something outside of the space of the purely collapsed subjective and purely dead objective. We’ll avoid the philosophical rabbit holes this may lead to, because we can directly talk about it, itself, by itself, without extra elaboration.

This series is sort of a love letter to Christopher Alexander, a philosopher-architect who refused to shrug at the alley-question, for fifty years. Alexander was born in Vienna in 1936, raised in England, trained as a mathematician at Cambridge, and then took the first PhD in architecture that Harvard ever awarded. He ended up at Berkeley and stayed for four decades. He sat with a single question the whole time: why are some buildings, some streets, some rooms “alive”, while others—often newer, cleaner, more expensive—are dead?

His most famous attempt at an answer was A Pattern Language (1977), a catalog of 253 recurring solutions to the problem of making places where life can happen. It covered window seats, courtyards, gardens, and how a good entrance works. It became one of the best-selling architecture books ever written, and, strangely, a founding text for software engineers, who took the idea of abstracted “patterns” and ran with it. But Alexander noticed that people could apply his patterns faithfully, and produce buildings that were still dead. The patterns seem to gesture towards a thing, but not quite contain it. He eventually came up with a name for what was missing: “the quality without a name”. He spent the rest of his life trying to catch it. His final work, The Nature of Order, distilled everything down to fifteen properties that living structure seems to share, and then followed his assumptions into the metaphysics of it all.

He spent fifty years chasing a bird that was perched on his own binoculars. This thing was obvious, but what was it? In the end, he concluded that the quality he wanted was never really in the buildings at all. It was something like a self, an “I” he called it, underneath everything, that “living” things let show through. He approached it by trying to understand the structure, so ended up needing a structure to contain it. By the fourth volume, that structure was the size of the universe.

I don’t think we actually need to follow him there. Not because he was wrong, who knows, but because we don’t need this conclusion at all. When we see a close friend after a long time or have that sense of resonance and beauty, we experience it. I know that thing, you know it too.

So that’s what we’ll actually look at. We’re starting from our present moment, the thing that is unadorned, unelaborated, plain, obvious, and perhaps even mundane. I’ll make no physical or metaphysical claims. If the bird rests on our binoculars, let’s stop scanning the trees, and just notice it. It was never hiding.

One of the things that Christopher Alexander noticed is that this quality has a density to it. It seems to gather. He called these points centers. Instead of thinking about it like something you could touch, think of it as peaks of salience that just show up. If we had to decompose one, we probably could, and would find more things that look like centers. Or if we zoomed out, we’d find larger centers. But again, this isn’t a claim about physics or emergence. We’re looking at things closer to whirlpools or little eddies in a river. If you tried to capture the whirlpool and separate it, it’d cease to be what it was. If you tried to construct a Durango alley so that people could touch the viscerality, it’d come off as strange. A five-year-old’s crayon drawing has this quality, but it’s also entirely dependent on the child, the family, and the time that it’s in.

“A wholeness, is an area of space or land, in which various centers have arisen… and they are, to a greater or lesser degree, coupled with one another. As a result of this coupling, each center gains a little more life.” — Christopher Alexander

This aliveness isn’t a binary quality that exists inside of something. Each center connects to the centers around it, within it, and those it is a part of. That strange network accrues aliveness. Each one adds to the resonant coupling, making all the related centers (and, paradoxically, itself) more vibrant.

Alexander walked from courtyards to the self to being, noticing this strange, delightful, obvious, mundane, plain essence. And yet, I find the story more beautiful and useful walking the other way. We’ve started here by directly noticing into this essence that we both already recognize. It’s not somewhere cosmic, but quite ordinary, yet wonderful. The alleys around me, a heartfelt apology, returning home, seeing your loved ones. It’s whatever I’ve evoked in you that feels special.

It can appear anywhere, and it’s made. We make friendships, we make a special time. It’s as if we’re finding space. Once that space exists, anything can emerge out of it. Because of this, we have places to go.

Each essay will explore one of the fifteen properties he found underneath his hundreds of patterns and use it instead as a dimension we can inflate to find this essence plainly in experience. Here they are as we’ll take them: strong centers, boundaries, contrast, roughness, gradients, levels of scale, alternating repetition, good shape, local symmetries, echoes, positive space, the void, simplicity and inner calm, deep interlock and ambiguity, and not-separateness. Even as bare names, some of these probably already tug at something.

He insisted the fifteen weren’t really separate things. They’re more like fifteen faces of the same quality. We’ll try to open one dimension enough that we can feel it. Once seen, these things tend to stay open on their own.

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Music in the audio version by my friend Jordan Welsh, photograph by my friend Noah Maier, and words by me.

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.

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If that sounds good, I’ll be happy to have you along. I expect it’ll be less heady and directly conceptual than my other writing.

Music in the audio version by my friend Jordan Welsh, words and painting by me.