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.

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 unfoloded world is like to see that it is likely -- or at least better able -- to contain this blissful, normal, unpreprocessing ordinary state in people.