The frame “pattern language” is doing more work than I realised. Calling them patterns rather than rules lets each one carry context and counter-examples; calling them a language commits to the patterns combining, not standing alone. A single pattern is incomplete in the way a single word is incomplete.
The patterns I keep returning to are the small ones — Light on Two Sides of Every Room, Window Place, Six-Foot Balcony. The big-scale patterns (about cities, regions, neighborhoods) are harder to evaluate without living somewhere built that way; the room-scale patterns are testable in a weekend.
What surprises me on a second read is how much the book is a critique disguised as a manual. The introduction is gentle; the patterns themselves are not. Many of them describe the absence of the thing they’re naming — what a room without daylight on two sides feels like, what a corridor without a destination does to a building. The patterns are arguments.
Still reading. Notes will widen as I get further in.