Preface

1. My Intention in Book 3

In Book 1, The Phenomenon of Life, I have offered a view of the natural and built worlds in which order is seen as underlying all life, and life -- visible as living structure -- a common and necessary feature of buildings.

In Book 2, The Process of Creating Life, I have argued that it is a special kind of adaptive process, not a mechanical or arbitrary application of properties, that creates life. Life in nature, and in the humanly constructed world, is generated by a process of unfolding in which living structure grows in stepwise fashion from a current condition (the system of centers which exists) and takes on greater life by a series of structure-preserving transformations, or adaptations. This life-generating process is, I have argued, knowlable and can guide human actions. The process is inherent in nature's infinite complexity and can only be grasped to a first approximation, but my hope is that readers will entertain and use the conception of living process as a reasonable approximation of how the built world comes to life.

Throughout Books 1 and 2, I have not disguised my belief and anger that the modern world -- especially with the advent of professional architecture separated from building -- has lost touch with life in the world we are making. We live in a world degraded and overwhelmed by construction which is driven by forces very different form, and often oblivious to, what I have been describing as necessary conditions for creating living order.

In this book, A Vision of a Living World, I try to show what happens if living processes are used pervasively, in widespread fashion, in our own era, and what kind of overall environment we may expect to see from their effects. I show examples of large buildings, small buildings, neighborhoods, gardens, public space, wilderness, houses, construction details, color, ornament.

The views I am advocating on building process are not widely accepted and they are often at odds with current ways of doing things. Still, I can only be grateful for having had so long and wide-ranging a chance to develop and to try many of my ideas on how to construct a wholesome, life-supporting world around us.

I hope to show that this world, because it is generated by repeated application of living processes, is indeed "living". That means, in particular, I hope it is visible in my examples that such a world is nourishing to human life and to human feeling; that it encompasses what we need, our joys, our sorrows. I would like you to begin to feel, for yourself, that such a world may be (at least in part) a model of the kind of world in which we might wish to live and in which we can live well.

Part One

The first two chapters contains discussion of what is perhaps the most important human issue in the built environment: our sense of ownership, participation, and belonging to the world.

Chapter 1, BELONGING AND NOT-BELONGING, suggests that our belonging to the world works in two ways: the belonging that we feel in public places and the belonging which we feel in individual, private, places. In a world whre living processes are working properly, each individual private place (whether private house, apartment, office, workplace, or workshop) will have its own uniqueness that allows its users to belong to it. At the same time, to work well each of these private places are directly attached to some hull of public space, thus giving us -- people -- participation in the social world at large.

Chapter 2, OUR BELONGING TO THE WORLD, describes with small examples, and with more intensity, just what I mean by belonging. This belonging -- the relation through which we human beings are connected to Earth -- a visceral feeling of joy -- hinges on the sensation that we have the right to be here, that we belong to the world and it belongs to us.

Only living process can generate belonging. When living process are working well, our belonging comes about naturally. Then, both in public and in private, our belonging to the Earth is established without effort.

1. Belonging and Not-Belonging

1. Who, Today, Can Truly Enjoy Belonging to the Earth?

How many human beings alive today can truly enjoy belonging to the Earth?

In chapter 2, I shall discuss belonging as an emotional fact of life, as a necessity. And I shall say something about the way it works. But I would like, if I can, in this chapter first to shock you into a recognition of the truly dreadful meaning of my pleasant-sounding words about belonging -- and persuade you that much of the emotional misery of the 20th century was caused by the terrible loss of belonging our contemporary processes inflicted on society.

The loss has been inflicted on us and on our fellow human beings. Belonging, although it was common in traditional towns and villages, is missing in far too much of modern society. The forms of environment we have learned to create in modern times have caused us to lose the sense of true connection to ourselves and our society. That has happened, in large part, because of the nature of space we have created. It has happened because the public space of our present-day cities, both legally and metaphorically, no longer belongs to us to any deep extent.

2. Our Belonging to the World

In the last chapter I have given a sketch of belonging, what it is, how important it is, how it is dependent, ultimately, on control of the people who live in a place over their environment.

I have not yet described belonging ITSELF -- what it is like, what it looks like, how it is interdependence of a particular and deep sort between people and the physical geometry of their surroundings. Nor have I yet given much sense of the DEPTH of the phenomenon -- how extraordinarily subtle it is. In this chapter I shall attempt these things, to lay a foundation for what follows.

While reading the chapter it may be helpful if you keep in mind a place you know, where you really belonged. Are you sure that there has even been such a place? And if so, what was it like, in detail? Then, as you think of it, and remember it, perhaps, you can use the examples of the chapter as a lens through which to think about that place.

1. The Link of Human Hapiness with the Environment

For this reason, in this second chapter, my aim is merely to describe this state in words and pictures, to comment on the fact that the places where it occurs are, morphologically, quite different from the places we have become used to as the products of developed architecture.

If you look through the pictures of this Book 3, you may get a hint of the kind of world I have in mind, the kind of world which perhaps could come about from wholesome living processes.

I hope in the next few hundred pages you will begin to understand well enough what an unfolded world is like to see that it is likely -- or at least better able -- to contain this blissful, normal, unpreprocessing ordinary state in people.

Most important of all, once again throughout all of it, is the relation of belonging, that condition in the world that allows us to exist as free beings, to pass our days and hours in a fashion that we know we are in places that belong to us -- so that the world is ours in spirit.

2. Belonging and True Comfort

What is the character of the kind of world where we experience emotional possession of the places we are in?

Historically, this quality which allows us to possess the Earth came about as a result of a long process -- often years, even centries long. It was a process in which minute adaptations, carried out gradually, created this mutual sense of belonging between people and their buildings and the land.

But in our era, the opportunity for this very long time span is less available. We live in a time where things move quickly, where society evolves at a very great speed, where people are highly mobile, where things change at great speed. The old historical forms of process, which created belongingness in historical society, will not do for us, and we must invent new kinds of process which can do it, again, in some new form, and by different means.

But even with all this, more is needed. The cleverest contracts, the most advanced procedures, are so tainted by the world we have inherited, that it is very, very hard to make place which have a genuine warmth, heartfelt connection with people's humanness. It is still difficult to implement the kind of innovations in construction -- administrative, financial, and other processes -- that allow fluid adaptational construction contracts and still keep a tight hold on time and money.

3. The Fifteen Properties

내가 1권과 2권에서 제시한 생명 구조에 대한 순수한 이론적 분석은 이 세상에서 우리의 생생한 꿈의 실체가 만들어낸, 가장 평범하면서도 달콤한, 그리고 놀라운 일상 현실을 포괄하기에는 충분하지 않다. The purely theoretical analysis of living structure as I have presented it in Books 1 and 2 is not enough to encompass this most ordinary, and yet so sweet, this wonderful everyday reality that our living dreaming substance on this earth is made of.

이 모든 경우에 있어서, 나는 가장 깊은 형태로 이 15가지 속성들이 이 생동감 넘치는 경험과 사랑스러운 편안함을 뒷받침해 준다고 믿는다. in all these cases, I believe it is the fifteen properties, perhaps in their deepest form, which provide the underpinning to this living experience and lovely comfort.

15가지 속성 각각은 한 방식이나 다른 방식으로 작용하며, 진정한 편안함을 창조하는 데 도움을 주고, 삶의 가치가 있는 이 wholesome(전체성 있는) 일상 존재를 위한 기반을 제공한다. Each of the fifteen properties, in one way or another, comes into play, helping to create true comfort, and giving us the underpinning for this wholesome ordinary existence which makes life worthwhile.

또한, 내가 2권 전반에 걸쳐 설명하려고 노력한 것처럼, 이 속성들을 생성하는 것은 구조를 보존하는 변형들로, 실제 장소에서 발생하며, 생명의 가능성과 우리 주변과의 진정한 연결의 가능성을 창조한다. 이러한 변형들은 세계의 전체성을 보존하고, 생명을 유지하고 창조하는 15가지 속성을 주입하며, 우리의 더 깊은 삶이 태어날 수 있는 매트릭스를 제공한다. In addition, as I have tried to explain throughout Book 2, it is the structure-preserving transformations which generate these properties, in real places, and create the possibility of life, and the possibility of our true connection to our surroundings. These transformations preserve the wholeness of the world, inject into it (while preserving it) those fifteen properties which sustain life, and create life, and which provide us with a matrix in which our deeper life may come into being.

4. Dependence of the Blissful State of Our Existence on the Most Ordinary Quality in Our Surroundings

The world supports or does not support -- supports in greater or lesser degree -- this feeling of belonging. And it is only when it does support in that we may reasonably call it "life" in the environment. So when I say that one doesn't have a sense of belonging in that place under the French housing project on page 44, I mean much more than merely that. I mean that it is very difficult indeed to be yourself in that place. I dare say that at the moment that picture was taken, not one of the people in that picture truly was himself, herself.

The sort of simple happiness you may see in some of the following pictures comes about because of the structure-preserving quality which emerges as the world unfolds -- but cannot come about through design in the accepted sense, or through planning in the accepted sense, or through construction in the accepted sense of the 20th century. It is -- was for me, when I began this work thirty years ago -- something that we architects largely do not know how to attain.

5. The Sense of Belonging

The profession encouraged architects to produce a visual character, and pays too little attention to the complex and subtle structure that only living processes create.

That is an environment where they are happy, where life is lived, perhaps fights break out, stories are told, sorrow may have its place, hunger, an exchange of feelings, the direct splash of memory as one person listens to another's story. That is the belonging I revere and hope for.

The quality of life you can see in that restaurant could not happen in a McDonald's.

6. More on the Blissful State

나는 내가 말하고 있는 감정을 불러일으키는 몇 가지 물리적 상황이 있다고 생각한다. 그것들은 사용자 디자인과 계약 절차와는 전혀 관계가 없다. There are some physical circumstances that give rise to the feelings I am speaking about. They have nothing to do with user design and contracting procedures.

하지만 내가 믿기로는, 우리가 의도적으로 만드는 장소들이 이러한 특성을 가질 수 있다. 나는 실제 공간 자체의 특성이 인간의 정신이 움켜잡고 자신의 것으로 만들 수 있는 빛나는 단순함을 만들어낸다고 믿는다. 나는 그 특성이 항상 진정한 전개(true unfolding)의 결과로, 즉 진정으로 살아있는 과정의 결과로 존재한다고 생각한다. But it is possible, I believe, for places we make for ourselves consciously to have this quality. I believe it is the characteristics of the actual space itself that create a luminous simplicity in which the human spirit can take hold and make it one's own. That quality exists, I think, always as a result of true unfolding, as a result of any truly living process.