The unity that speaks of I

Intro to part 2

What I have presented in these four books is intended to become a part of a new science — a first sketch of a new kind of scientific theory.

Since the creation of a work of building must always be, at root, creation of living structure, I have built to the best of my ability a picture of living structure and of the process that can generate living structure. The picture is sufficient, I believe, for working architects to carry in our minds, a vision of our task. But this picture necessarily touches physics. The existence of living structure, as I have defined it, requires modifications in our physical picture of the world, not only in the picture which we have of architecture. And, in the most subtle phases of this work, we are forces — I believe — by the arguments presented in Book 4, to go still further. It is not enough merely to have a picture of living structure, but necessary, also, to recognize that there is something ineffable, a mystical core in things, that is deeply related to our own individual self, and that this — not something else — is the true core both of matter and of architecture. That, too, must find expression

Intro to chapter 6

To make the reader share with me my sense of what is really happening in the architectural examples where life appears, I shall now try to describe something — a feeling so remote from our ordinary sense of things, that it may have to be called meta-physical — truly beyond physics.

This — what I describe in this chapter — is how I experience the reaching for the ultimate unity when a building or an ornament is being made. It is also how I experience its effect when it has been made. Far-fetched or not, this is what appears to me to be going on, this is how I do experience the presence of the mysterious and ultimate quality that can occur in a made thing.

The experience concerns the universal I — how it is felt, how it appears when it comes into a work, what it appears as, how it functions in establishing a relatedness between the work and the person and the universe.

Somehow — whether it be in color, or in a harmonious garden, or in a room whose light and mood are just right, or in the awesome wall of a great building which allows us to walk near it — some placid, piercing unity occurs, sharp and soft, embracing, tying all things together, wrapping us up in it, allowing us to feel our own unity.

(Pages 144-146)