The necessary role of process

We have to make — or generate — the ten thousand living centers in the building, one by one. That is the core fact. And the ten thousand centers, to be living centers, must be beautifully adapted to one another within the whole: each must fit the others, each must contribute to the others, and the ten thousand centers then — if they are truly living — must form a coherent and harmonious whole.

There are many thousands of different processes which can succeed. But to succeed, these processes must meet definite conditions — defined in the chapters which follow. Processes which meet these conditions, even though there may be thousands of them, are limited. They are rare and precious, compared with the millions upon millions of processes which are used daily for conceiving, designing, and building by architects and builders all over the world.

The lifeless buildings and environments which have become common in modern society are not merely dead, non-living, structures. They are what they are precisely because of the social processes by which they have been conceived, designed, built, and paid for. No matter how skillful the architects, no matter how gifted, no matter how profound their powers of design — if the process used is wrong, the design cannot save the project.
Thus we shall see that processes (both of design and of construction) are more important, and larger in their effect on the quality of buildings, than the ability or training of the architect. Processes play a more fundamental role in determining the life of death of the building than does the “design”

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