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.