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Summaries of all 253 patterns in Christopher Alexander's book. Found via Brian Foote's blog, Catfish in the Memepool.

I never fancied myself a devout Jew, but I still didn't anticipate that entering the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris would nearly convert me to Catholicism that very instant. Seriously, I actually thought about entering a confession booth and telling the preist that I had clearly made a mistake early on and really belonged in this church.

Seeing Notre Dame is not like seeing other cathedrals. I've seen a few— the one in Uppsala, Sweden being perhaps the grandest— but Notre Dame blows them all away. First, it is in Paris. Because of this, your aesthetic senses are already aroused before you begin your approach. And you will approach gradually: you begin by seeing its spires over the neighboring buildings and river. Then you start to follow the curves and points of its elaborate ironwork. You enter an adjacent park, where a central fountain is flanked by dozens of benches, each row shaded by a line of trees whose canopies have been trimmed flat on six sides that meet at right angles.

At this point, you will spend several minutes attempting to reconcile the fact that Notre Dame's flying buttresses are just big ass stone supports for big ass stone walls with their incredibe aesthetic effect. You might walk around to the front, where a statue of Charlemagne on his horse will distract you momentarily. And then you'll stare at the doorways. In each of these doorway arches there is more art than the average person will meaningfully take in within twenty years.

But this is all just window dressing for the interior. Outside it is all roughly grey; inside the stained glass streams color richer than Poussin's draperies.

These days, it's easy to avoid being religious, because we see so few miracles. Science and literacy and communication and art have become so ubiquitous outside political circles, that we are hardly touched or shocked by anything. Past a certain age, we've all seen the photographs, read the stories, and heard the music from Bach to Biggie. But long ago, our destinies were not thought to be so much within our comprehension, let alone within our control. To stand in Notre Dame, with its dozen alcove chapels and statues and paintings and carved stone and confessionals and 300-foot vaulted ceilings and, my god, two rose windows that actually literally gave me goosebumps— well, then you start to believe in miracles.

I can only imagine how it would have affected one in the 13th century.

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Transcript of Alexander's OOPSLA speech.

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Godseye is a project that allows its users to attach pictures and stories to homes, trees, shops, and other parts of their neighborhoods and cities. You begin by gradually zooming in on high-quality, color aerial photographs, then selecting a building or other feature. When you focus on a specific feature, you can view and contribute storefront photographs, histories, or personal stories.

The potential uses of this data are vast and compelling. We spend lots of time playing around in online communities now, but there can be a mutually beneficial relationship between physical and online neighborhoods, and godseye proves it beautifully.

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How "trusted computing" initiatives endanger freedom on the net. Haven't read this yet, but I think I know mostly what it's going to say. And there is no turning back: we definitely need some tools to restrict freedom on the net, because there is too much junk floating around. The scale of the net has grown to the point that we come to depend on sociotechnical structures that can privilege certain parties over others. Frassle is one such tool. Google is another.

When we build these tools in the internet, however, we have the opportunity to invent new societal structures that reflect better values. This is perhaps the greatest appeal of the net for me: it's a space where people organize themselves, their relationships, and their knowledge. The tools we give people to use on the net shape its living environment. The net is, at its best, like a city that we all live in. TCP/IP and web servers, in the net world, take a role like physics and chemistry in meatspace. Applications like search engines are like highways. Communications hubs like friendster are like universities or clubs. The universal value, appeal, and permanence of the internet convince me that in 1000 years, people will consider the internet as intrinsic a part of the human social experience as we now consider the city.