Introduction

What is, truly, the ultimate nature of matter?

Footnote 1

The over-confident statements of quantum physicists in recent decades — no matter how confidently they assert that we are within a hair’s breadth of the answer to everything, and that we have 99% of the picture clear — do not answer the questions. […]

A surprising number of these scientists, though not all, hold the view that ultimate answers to these questions will require some kind of synthesis of what we now know separately as science and religion.


I have expressed my conviction that architecture cannot be good so long as we try to do it within a mechanical conception of matter. Because of the recursive nature of life, living centers cannot be well-represented in a mechanical picture; not can the essential connection between a living building and the “interior” of the human being. […]

We must have a vision of the world in which life, as the foundation of all architecture, is understood as something objective and inspiring. That idea is beautiful, worthwhile, profound enough to provide a satisfactory underpinning for our work as architects, artists, ecologists, and builders of the world. But it cannot be understood, or used, successfully, I think, without making changes in our concept of the matter from which the world is made.


The fact that such a modified world-picture might arise in part from architecture, not only from physics, is significant. Our present picture of the universe, which does come mainly from physics, is hamstrung by the unavoidable narrowness of physical investigations. The character of wholeness, one of the major unsolved problems in 20th-century physics, is more easily revealed by consideration of architectural problems than by consideration of problems in physics.

Thus architecture, previously the recipient of cosmological conceptions that originated in physics, might perhaps itself now become a contributor to cosmology. Cosmology may gain insight from the special problems of architecture, because these special architectural problems crystallize — and can inject new understanding into — profound problems that exist in physics.

(Page 318)

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