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

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.

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.)

> 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".

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

>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".

This is just an artifact of compressing 1500+ pages (iirc) into the length a blog post. Alexander was (RIP) one of the most fanatically human-focused designers of his field. His visual description of strong centers and spectators was usually hyper-literal; users look at the building while they use it, so its look should facilitate its use. In the large this means the form of the building should help direct the user's attention towards what they're using it for, meaning anything from shaping a courtyard to keep occupants flowing smoothly and prevent disorientation to positioning furniture and light sources and windows to keep the user unimpeded, mentally centered, and comfortable (He even leaned in to an early version of iterative design, encouraging constructing models, and then doing the real construction in phases with the architect on-site, to reassess and dial in things like room size and window positioning)[0]. In the small it means designing features and ornamentation of the construction to avoid either the extremes of cold flatness or excess-born noise, meaning elements should be on the one hand artistic and interesting to look at, but at the same time subtle and undemanding while they're in the periphery of whatever you're actually doing in the building.

Alexander seems to have started his work on A Pattern Language, whose subtitle is "Towns, Buildings, Construction", out of exasperation with what he saw as a fashion of buildings designed to look good in the magazine perspective drawing instead of feeling good to the user , and city plans designed to geometrically impress from the scale of the district blueprint instead of the person on the street. Language of "the spectator" is in reference to his attempt to shift this perspective back to where it belonged.

[0]I believe this was during TNoO, but even in A Pattern Language and its companions The Oregon Experiment and The Timeless Way of Building he encouraged using techniques and materials that would enable a great deal of post-construction rennovation, and for organizations to devote as much money to enhancing old projects as to building new ones.

Indeed, it seems the author chose to separate behavior of the "user/creator" from aesthetic for the purpose of this argument. Which could be perhaps due to the author trying to separate their own ego from these sort of trueisms that they perceive to be inherent constructs that all structures/objects contain. However, it seems we can see their ego still in their use of the word "spectator", which I would argue is how the author has placed themselves.

Where I think they were going with this I'll explain in an example. If you take an urban city, the centers are the buildings, the shops, businesses, etc, where meaning and behavior has been centered and distributed across a grid of streets. The streets would represent the lowest hierarchy, as on the streets its anarchy of meaning wherein the occupants of the street bear little collective purpose. But once you enter a store, suddenly there is a unified purpose seen in the design of the store and the behavior of it's occupants that mutually reinforce each other. Such that these hierarchies are easily distinguishable(their attraction). To be attracted to something one must first define the boundaries of the object, one is attracted to a collection of behaviors or manifestations of nature that they construct as an object.

I get what you're saying, and it kind of strikes me that way too. But: many modern homes (mine included) have fake shutters on each side of the windows. Why? I guess it's just for looks, as very very few houses have functional shutters.

Spector in the sense that they perceive in and move through the space. They don’t create or manipulate the space at the scale under consideration.

That is my interpertation.