Just finished an after dinner conversation with my architect, Ross Chapin. He’s writing a book on pocket communities and was talking about that and about another book idea he has about what makes a house harmonious and how a sort of “just rightness” is realized. Ross calls this beauty mind. He says, “The way we perceive the life of a space or object is by feeling. It’s not a head thing. It’s like each of us has our own internal tuning fork that resonates in the presence of life.”

That’s true, but I believe that the ability to perceive or enter beauty mind, I’m not really sure exactly what it is, but then he is still exploring the idea himself, is based not just on a felt perception but requires a base of knowledge as its foundation. I’m thinking back to Blink by Malcom Gladwell, who has found that experts often have a visceral reaction to bad or even not quite right examples within the field in which they are expert. It’s literally a felt reaction.

Now Ross is certainly an expert architect, who is receiving a lot of national attention with his community housing projects and cottages. Is his beauty mind an inherent trait or is it his reaction to less than harmonious design decisions? I asked him that and he said that he’d think about it.

He feels that beauty mind is often dulled by advertising and commercial culture, but then what isn’t. Is beauty mind an inherent characteristic or is it developed as a byproduct of intense involvement and study in any particular field?