Every skill should have one unmistakable thing it does; sprawling skills violate the Strong Centers principle.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• The very same principles (positive space, alternating repetition, powerful centers) apply at every scale, from ornament to land and building structure.claim0.798
  Universality of the geometric principles across scales.
• In buildings, especially, the success of the process will be judged by the extent to which these middle-range entities appear with their own distinct symmetries, with their own definite and distinct force as strong centers.claim0.789
  Proposes middle-range entity quality as the criterion for judging the success of a building process
• A skill should do its work and stop, avoiding performative complexity and multi-stage flows when single-pass suffices.claim0.788
• Every strong center is made of many other strong centers—a multiplicity of centers at different levels which engages us; the concept is recursive, not referring to one grand centerclaim0.788
  Recursive definition of strong centers: they are composed of and supported by other strong centers at multiple scales
• A thing which has the field of centers always does make a person near it feel more whole.claim0.786
• The key lesson in all this is simple and extreme. The field of centers cannot be created as a by-product of some existing process.quote0.779
  Emphasizes that creating living structure requires dedicated focus.
• Centers within a whole intensify each other, resulting in a profound and lively whole.claim0.779
  Alexander's core mechanism explaining how the Fifteen Properties function to create living wholes.
• The structure which is created by a feeling for centers and by a conscious and deliberate aim towards the feeling of the whole, will often turn out to be an efficient structure.claim0.775
  Reiterated empirical observation from twenty years of practice.