[abeppu]

> 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".

[Phiwise_]

>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.

[alekee]

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.

[mcswell]

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.

[detourdog]

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.