Author's Note: The Concept of Living Structure

The basic idea of Book 1 is this: Throughout the world, in the organic as in the inorganic, it is possible to make a distinction between living structure and non-living structure.

The question is, How is living structure to be made by human being? What kind of human-inspired processes can create living structure?

Real life created by a process in the caribbean

It should be repeated again and again, and understood, that the capacity of a society to create living structure in its architecture is a dynamic capacity which depends on the nature and character of the processes used to create form, and to create the precise sequence and character of the unfoldings that occur during the daily creation of building form and landscape form and street form.

For this purpose I shall, in the chapters of this book, move from the technical language of structure-preserving process to the broader and more intuitive language of living process. I shall define a living process as any process that is capable of generating living structure.

Above all, the living processes which I shall describe, are - as it turns out - enormously complex. The idea that all living processes are structure-preserving turns out to be merely the tip of a very large iceberg of hidden complexity. The subject of living process is a topic of great richness, which is likely to keep us occupied for centuries as we try to master its variety of meanings and its attributes and potentialities.

Preface: On Process

1. A Dynamic view of order

Book 1 invited us to see the world around us - buildings, plants, a painting, our own faces and hands - as field-like structures with centers arranged in a systematic fashion and interacting within the whole. When a structure is living we will feel the echo of our own aliveness in response to it.

Book 2 takes the necessary next step of investigating the process of how living structure creates itself over time;

• A child becomes an adult without ever losing uniqueness or completeness
• An acorn transforms smoothly into an oak, although the start and endpoint are radically different.
• A good building or city will unfold according to the living process that generate living structure.

Book 2 invites us to consider the role and importance of process and how it is living or not. It is about the fact that that order cannot be understood sufficiently well in purely static terms because there is something essentially dynamic about order.

Book 1 focused on the idea of living structure, and the viewpoint was geometric, static. In Book 2, I start with a second concept, based on the idea of an unfolded structure. The point of view - even for the structure itself - is dynamic.

The two conceptions of structure turn out to be complementary. In the end we shall see that living structure and unfolded structure are equivalent. All living structure is unfolded and all unfolded structure is living.

2. The necessary role of process

In a living environment, each of these individual places is a living center in its own right.