Jacobson is one of the co-authors of A Pattern Language wiki 
Christopher Alexander has always been working with important co-authors and they rarely get mentionned. This has to change.
# What is beauty?
- a beautiful object is whole = complete, economical in the sense that you can't take anything away from it without hurting it - beauty embodies a kind of truth and embodies a certain kind of relationship which can be human or geometric - functional excellence leads to beauty - we demand to beauty not be evil, that it has to be on the side of good.
POST http://image-transporter.apps.allmende.io/image
# What does beauty generate?
- beauty generates pleasure, physical pleasure like a sunny corner of a house where you're reading a book. - beauty conforts psychological pain, fatigue, unease and angst - it elevates one's psycholigcal frame of mine. "Beauty strengthens our inner landscape:" - beauty brings about forceful emotions - beauty brings about intellectual pleasure, source and truth
# Beauty and the Pattern Language
building projects and development projects often start with taking down a beautiful building and doing something cold, stiff and unnatural
Beauty has a methodology behind, but you will hardly find it. Beauty comes about through "just doing", that is applying the patterns in concrete practices and this makes one feel being able to create beauty.
Does the Pattern Language produce beautiful buildings? -> it improves what you do, to go beyond the "good enough" buildings. For instance: Sala House wiki
The Sala House in Albany, California, from the northeast.
source
An example of organic beauty: frost crystals occurring naturally on cold glass form fractal patterns source
# Organic Beauty - where all the relationsships are there - occur in nature - are a mirror of the self -> you will recognize it by asking yourself to which extend this object is similar to your deepest self
# Reactions to A Pattern Language - many at Berkeley felt, that this was dangerous - others thought that it was "intellectually week" - others judged that it was medieval design that could be applied elsewhere but not in the modern world - only some Universities took the approach seriously, f.i. Oregon, Darmstadt, Naples - some picked out two or three patterns of the book and started building thinking that they were applying the approach
A cycloid generated by a rolling circle source
# Limitation of Alexander's Approach (according to Jacobson)
- ignores some sublime aspects of beauty
- ignores that there is something, that is bigger than as
- has an "starchitect" element - f.i. only shows pictures of his work and never critizes them
- discourages theoretical approaches - f.i mathematical ideas as a bottom line for bringing about beauty -> doesn't f.i. Golden Ratio, Cycloid (wiki ) Ceiling Shape, Palladin , Gaudi's use of the
- ignores beautiful social ideas
# See also Purplsoc 2017, Purplsoc