A fusion of self and matter

Physicists, certainly, must face this confrontation. Architects, too, must face it.

What I have to say in the next chapters, rests on the search for such a new cosmology: one in which the idea of great art is possible — even necessary — as something which connects us to the universe, something which can provide a proper underpinning for the art of building.

The cosmology which I describe, as I work my way through the task of reaching a deeper view of building, rests on the recognition of the I — the source of our own self — as something real, existing together with space and matter in the universe, something which must be given its status, together with space and time, as part of a new view of living structure in a more comprehensive material view of things.

In these chapters, and finally in the conclusion of the book on pages 317-38, I put forward a sketch of a modified cosmology that extends physics — a way of extending our view of matter that leaves our present physics nearly intact, yet adds to it and injects into it new features, not presently part of our picture of matter, but capable, in principle, of making better sense of everything, and making better sense of architecture.

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