Possibility of a new view of architectural process

When living structure is created, what is to be built is made consistent with the whole, it comes from the whole, is nourishes and protect the whole.
We may get some inkling of this kind of thing by considering what it means to design a building, and to compare it with what it means to make a building. Naively, I make a building if I actually do it myself, do it with my own hands. This sounds like fun. But of course that is impossible for all but the very smallest buildings. More deeply, what it means for me to make a building is that I am totally responsible for it. I am actually responsible for its structure, its materials, its functioning, its safety, its cost, its beauty, everything. This is in marked contrast with the present idea of architecture, where as an architect I am definitely not responsible for everything. I am only responsible for my particular part in the process, for my set of drawings, which will then function, within the system, in a strictly limited fashion that is shut off from the whole. I have limited responsibility. Like a bureaucrat, I play my role, but “don’t ask me to be responsible for anything — I am just doing my job”.

When I make something, on the other hand, I am deeply involved with it and responsible for it. And not only I. Whether I am head of some project, or a person making some small part of it, the feeling of total responsibility is on my shoulders. In a good process, each person working on the building is — and feels — responsible for everything. For design, schedule, structure, flowers, feeling — everything.

This was vastly removed from the “I-am-just-doing-my-job” attitude which exists in the fragmented and mechanical process most often followed today, where the demarcation of responsibility is socially and legally drawn to make sure each person does not feel responsible for the whole.
I do not suggest that making should be reintroduced for reasons of nostalgia. But I shall prove that a process which is not based on making in a holistic sense, cannot create a living structure.

Non-living process is a recent arrival on the planet Earth. It is only in the modern era, and chiefly in the last 50-100 years, that human beings have given widespread use to processes of all kinds which are non-living, which therefore generate quantities of non-living structure.
However, since the distinction between living process and non-living process has now become visible, and since, for the time being, we have no precise conception or definition of living process, it has become urgent that we try to get one.
In this book I make an effort, perhaps for the first time, to make this distinction and to lay a basis for a theory — and for a form of daily practice — which allows for a world in which living process, hence living structure, dominates the world and its creation.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/Preface — On Process#