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.

Strictly speaking, every structure has some degree of life. The main accomplishment of Book 1 is in making this distinction precise, in providing empirical methods for observing and measuring degree of life as it occurs in different structures. Perhaps most important, I gave in Book 1 partly mathematical account of living structure, so that we may see the content of living structure, its functional and geometric order, as an established and objective feature of reality.

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. Living structure can be attained in practice, and will become fully comprehensible and reachable, only from a dynamic understanding. Indeed the nature of order is interwoven in its fundamental character with the nature of the process which create the order.

When we look at order dynamically, the concept of living structure itself undergoes some change. 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 turns 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. And I believe the concept of an unfolded structure is as important, and should play as essential a role in architecture, as the concept of *living* structure. Thus we shall end up with two equivalent views -- one static, one dynamic -- of the same idea.

2. The necessary role of process

What process can accomplish the subtle and beautiful adaptation of the parts that will create a living architecture? In a certain sense, the answer is simple. We have to make -- or generate -- the ten thousand living centers in the bulding, one by one. That is the core fact. And the ten thousand centers, to be living centers, must be beautifully adapted to one another within the whole: each must fit the others, each must contribute to the others, and the ten thousand centers then -- if they are truly living -- must form a coherent and harmonious whole.

It is generally assumed that doing all this well is the proper work of an architect. This is what an architect is supposed to do. It is what an architect is trained to do. And -- in theory -- it is what an architect knows how to do. There is a general belief that how it is done by the architect and others is part of the mystery of the art; one does not ask too many questions about it.

Thus we shall see that processes (both of design and of construction) are more important, and larger in their effect on the quality of buildings, than the ability or training of the architet. Process play a more fundamental role in determining the life or death of the building than does the "design."

3. Order as Becoming

The waves of the ocean are the flowing product of the process of interaction between wind and water. ... In each case, the whole system of order we observe is only an instantaneous cross section, in time, of a continuous and ongoing process of flux and change.

일리아 프리고진이 여기서 나와? 자기조직화 참고.

4. Process, The Key to Making Life in Things

"Yes, this daily ordinary things is almost more important than the other."

But it is the two together: the daily pleasure, breathing in the smell of newly cut grass, with the deeper knowledge that goes with it that in this process he is making a living structure, up ther on the ridge of the Berkeley hills.

Once we recognize the possibility that some centers will be helpful to the life of an existing wholeness, while others will be antagonistic to it, we then begin to recognize the possibility of a highly complex kind of self-consistency in any given wholeness.

What is fascinating, then is the hint of a conception of value which emerges dynamically from respect for existing structure. We do not need any arbitrary or external criterion of value. The value exists within the unfolding of the wholeness itself. ... When the wholeness unfolds naturally, value is created.

That is the origin of living structure.

The further I went to understand the actual process which had been used to make the tile, the more I realized that it was this process, more than anything, which governs the beauty of the design. Perhaps nine-tenths of its character, its beauty, comes simply from the process that the maker followed. ... The design is indeed beautiful, yes. But it can only be made as beautiful as it is within the technique, or process, used to make it. And once one uses this technique, the design -- what appears as the sophisticated beauty of the design -- follows almost without thinking, just as a result of following the process.

The "design" of this beautiful work is not more than a tenth of what gives it its life. Nine-tenths comes from the process.

This gradual rubbing together of phenomena to get the right result, the slow process of getting things right, is almost unknown to us today.

5. Our Mechanized Process

반면 오늘날은, ...

They have been designed and constructed with no knowledge of the building at all; they are mentally and factually separate from its existence, but are brought into play only by a process of assembly.

The trouble is that it is mechanical process only, something which subverts the inner fire of true living process.

In a mechanistic view of the world, we see all things, even if for convenience, as machines. A machine is intended to accomplish something. It is, in its essence, goal-oriented.

For in fact, everything is constantly changing, growing, evolving.

Why is this process-view essential? Because the ideals of "design", the corporate broadroom drawing of the imaginary future, the developer's slick watercolor perspective of the future end-state, control our conception of what must be done - yet they bear no relation to the actual nature, or problems, or possibilities, of a living environment.

6. Possibility of a New View of Architectural Process

I shall argue that every good process in architecture, and in city planning also, treats the world as a whole and allows every action, every process, to appear as an unfolding of that whole. When living structure is created, what is to be built is made consistent with the whole, it comes from the whole, it nourishes and protects the whole.

We may get some inkling of this kind of thing by considering what it means to design a building, and to compare it with what it means to make a building.

More deeply, what it means for me to make a building is that I am totally responsible for it.

This is in marked contrast with the present idea of architecture, where as an architect I am desinitely not responsible for everything. I am only responsible for my particular part in the process, for my set of drawings, which will then function, within the system, in a strictly limited fashion that is shut off from the whole. I have limited responsibility.

When I make something, on the other hand, I am deeply involved with it and responsible for it. And not only I. ... In a good process, each person working on the building is -- and feels -- responsible for everything.

I shall prove that a process which is not based on making in a holistic sense, cannot create a living structure.

However, since the distinction between living process and non-living process has now become visible, and since, for the time being, we have no precise conception or definition of living process, it has become urgent that we try to get one.

.

Wholeness, defined structurally, is the inter-locking, nested, overlapping system of centers that exists in every part of space.

Part 1. Structure-Preserving Transformations

In the first four chapters I focus on the idea that a living process always has enormous respect for the state (and morphology and form) of what exists, and always finds a next step forward which preserves the structure of what exists, and develops and extends its latent structure as it creates change, or evolution, or development. This is the process which is "creative."

In chapters 1 and 2, I address these issues for cases in the natural world, and provide the outline of a tentative approach that helps us understand the unfolding of geometry in biology and physics. This theory provides the underpinning for what follows. In chapters 3 and 4, I turn my attention to the BUILT world, to towns and buildings and to the way the emergence of living structure in towns and buildings may be understoode within that context of theory.

1. The Principle of Unfolding Wholeness in Nature

1. Introduction

How does nature create living structure?

It is, in a more general sense, the character of all that we perceive as "nature". The living structure is the general morphological character which natural phenomena have in common.

What I call the living structure of nature is also largely governed by these fifteen properties and their interaction and superposition.

But why does living structure, with its multiplicity of centers and their associated fifteen properties, keep making its appearance in the natural world? Why and how, does living structure keep recurring in these widely different domains? What is the mechanics of the process by which living structure is made to appear, so easily, in nature? What is the process by which this kind of structure repeatedly, and persistently, occurs?

I start by trying to understand nature in a new way. Once we have that understanding, we may have a basis for thinking about architectural process and for creating a living world in the realm of architecture. In a good building, as in nature, there is also living structure. Each living center contains thousands of living centers; and the centers support each other in an intricate pattern.

"To learn how to create living structure in buildings, we had better start by looking at nature."

Note for the Scientific Reader

2. Structure-Preserving Transformations

1장에서, 나는 모든 natural process가 어떻게든 "smooth"하다는 것을 소개했다.

process가 "smooth"하다는 것은 무슨 의미인가? 나는 smooth transformation을, preserve structure and wholeness한 transformation이라고 정의한다. 앞으로 이런 유형의 transformation을 structure-preserving transformation이라고 하겠다.

as a result of the repeated application of structure-preserving transformation to the wholeness which exists.

이 장의 스케치를 봐라.

매 단계마다, 추가(addition)나 주입(injection)이 있다. 어떠한 새로운 center가 도입된다. 하지만 이 새 센터는 foreign body처럼 무작위로 추가되지 않는다. It grows out of what was there before.

나는 존재하는 센터를 강화한다. 비록 그것이 처음에는 숨겨져 있고 약할지라도. 이 센터를 강화함으로써, 나는 센터들의 시스템 가운데 새로운 균형(balance)을 만들어낸다. 그리고 indeed disk를 통틀어 a modified system of centers를 야기한다.

3. Structure-Preserving Transformations in Traditional Society

4. Structure-Destroying Transformations in Modern Society

Interlude

5. Living Process in the Modern Era: Twentieth-Century Cases Where Living Process Did Occur

Part Two: Living Process

6. Generated Structure

7. A Fundamental Differentiating Process

8. Step-by-step Adaptation

9. Each Step is Always Helping to Enhance the Whole

10. Always Making Centers

11. The Sequence of Unfolding

12. Every Part Unique

13. Patterns: Generic Rules for Making Centers

14. Deep Feeling

15. Emergence of Formal Geometry

16. Form Language and Style

17. Simplicity

Part Three: A New Paradigm for Process in Society

18. Encouraging Freedom

19. Massive Process Difficulties

== 20. The Spread of

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