Order as becoming
In many sciences, it has become commonplace to consider process as an inescapable part of order.
In physics, for example, forces themselves are now seen as processes, and the structure we observe in the world of atoms and electrons is known to come about as a result of the continuous play of subatomic processes defined by quantum mechanics.
In biology, the structure of an organism is understood to be inseparable from the process which creates and maintains it: an animal, at any instant, is the ongoing result of certain genetically controlled processes which create the organism to begin with, and which continue to create that organism throughout its life.
A cloud is a transitory by-product of the condensation of water in the atmosphere. The waves of the ocean are the flowing product of the process of interaction between wind and water. The sand ripples in the Sahara are the product of the process by which the wind takes sand, picks it up, and drops it. The mountain is the temporary product of the folding and heaving of the earth. The flower is the temporary product of the unfolding of the bud and seed pod under the driving influence of DNA.
In each case, the whole system of order we observe is only an instantaneous cross section, in time, of a continuous and ongoing process of flux and change.
Much more recently, the physicist Ilya Prigogine took decades, and many books and papers, to show that physics must be understood as a directional process — and that the way classical physics viewed phenomena without the orientation of time was fundamentally at odds with reality and was incapable, therefore, of describing some of the most important phenomena. As Prigogine wrote in 1980s: “In classical physics change is nothing but a denial of becoming and time is only a parameter, unaffected by the transformation that it describes.”
Now, at the turn into the 21st century, the “process” insight has finally arrived in most scientific disciplines. Gradually, a modern view has come into focus where we understand that it is the transformations from moment to moment which govern order in a system.
Our current view of architecture rests on too little awareness of becoming as the most essential feature of the building process. Architects are much too concerned with the design of the world (its static structure), and not yet concerned enough with the design of the generative processes that create the world (its dynamic structure).
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/Preface — On Process#