[wordup] Quality without a name

[Adam Shand]

I hadn't heard this phrase before.  I like it ...

Sidenote ... if the formatting of some of my messages is coming out
weird please let me know, I'm trusting Thunderbird to do the "right
thing" but I'm not sure that's a sensible idea.

Adam.

Via: http://www.smallworks.com/archives/00000481.htm
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_without_a_name

The *quality without a name* (QWAN) is a phrase used by Christopher
Alexander <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander> in his
book The Timeless Way of Building
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Timeless_Way_of_Building>. In the
book, Alexander describes a certain quality which we should seek, but
which is unnamed:

“ 	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. The search which we make
for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person,
and the crux of any individual person's story. It is the search for
those moments and situations when we are most alive. 	”

“ 	This quality in buildings and in towns cannot be made, but only
generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of the people, just as a
flower cannot be made, but only generated from a seed. 	”

He goes on to say:

“ 	The specific patterns of which a building or a town is made may be
alive or dead. To the extent they are alive, they let our inner forces
loose, and set us free; but when they are dead, they keep us locked in
inner conflict. The more living patterns there are in a place-a room, a
building, or a town-the more it comes to life as an entity, the more it
glows, the more it glows, the more it has that self maintaining fire
which is the quality without a name. 	”

Alexander considers, and rejects, several words which might describe
this quality:

        * alive
        * whole
        * comfortable
        * free
        * exact
        * egoless
        * eternal

These words are related to the Quality, but Alexander feels they fail to
truly capture the Quality without a name. Some feel that "aliveness" and
"wholeness" come closest to describing the quality.

Alexander's work has strongly affected a variety of discipines,
including architecture <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture>,
urban planning <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning>, and
software engineering <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering>.

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