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.