A world which enhances human life

A living environment is one which encourages, allows, each person to react appropriately to what happens, hence to be free, hence to encourage the most fruitful development in each person. This is an environment which goes as far as possible in allowing people’s tendencies, their inner forces, to run loose, so that they can take care, by themselves, of their own development. It is an environment in which a person is free to grow, if she wishes to grow, and to do so where, and how, she chooses.

This environment will be, by character and in structure, something far less ordered in the superficial sense than we architects may imagine. It will be more rambling, with a deeper kind of order than we have come to expect from our profession, something more like the rock pool with its hundreds of species, a subtle biological order containing vast structure, but seeming, on the surface and geometrically, almost disorderly.

Some people thought that A Pattern Language was written to recreate a nostalgic atmosphere, since so many of the patterns resemble things “as they used to be”. In fact, the content is far more practical. The patterns describe 253 of the most common subtly conflicting systems of forces which can occur in the human environment, and show what configurations will eliminate the stress cycle, release people’s natural force, and thus make room for positive forces, positive emotions, and positive human interactions to have free play.

#book/The Nature of Order/1 The Phenomenon of Life/10 The impact of living structure on human life#