The Quality with No Name
|
|
|
And what is good, Phædrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance
Brad Appleton discusses a phrase of Christopher Alexander:
“The ‘Quality Without A Name‘ (abbreviated as the acronym QWAN) is the quality that imparts incommunicable beauty and immeasurable value to a structure….
Alexander proposes the existence of an objective quality of aesthetic beauty that is universally recognizable. He claims there are certain timeless attributes and properties which are considered beautiful and aesthetically pleasing to all people in all cultures (not just ‘in the eye of the beholder’). It is these fundamental properties which combine to generate the QWAN….”
See, too, The Alexander-Pirsig Connection.