Why is it so difficult to form centers by differentiation? An illustration from postmodern architecture

This is typical of postmodern architecture — which gains its forms and plans, by making copies of historical plans and images — and literally cutting and pasting them into the plans.

Centers do not emerge from the surrounding wholeness

Because these forms have been cut or pasted into the plan, they do not have the capacity to emerge naturally from what is there. Thus, they are isolated, in a realistic and literal sense. They do not emerge by transformations of the surrounding structure. Instead, they are cut and transplanted. Thus, they appear context-less, and cut off. They do not extend the surrounding structure. And for this reason they fail to create the seamless structure which is typical in a living field of centers.

A real center starts many diameters outside its skin or boundary — the structure beyond contributes to the centeredness. This is an essential attribute of any real center.
But these centers, because they are cut and transplanted, do not have this feature. They are very weak centers, because they do not extend outward far enough.

Centers do not help form any larger centers

The centers also do not cooperate to form larger centers. […] The different and separate centers remain separate. They do not cooperate to form anything. So they remain silly, trivial in feeling — above all because structurally they do not have the proper character.

On first analysis it looks like the Sterling library is faulty because the details are too crude. […] But the deeper problem, is that successful larger wholes do not appear in the building, it has not made larger wholes. The smaller centers — already weak — do not succeed in forming larger centers, or in making the larger centers live.

Are the centers in the building, then, indeed good centers? It appears that under the surface, the thing has profound defects structurally. The centers which seem so strong and center-like, are very, very weak.

In the way I have described, the level of understanding which existed among postmodern architects was often too simple. One sees, and feels, a limitation in the building, some strange, perhaps unnatural feeling, that exists in the building. If you read the magazines, it would appear (and architects sometimes claim) that they are doing these things on purpose, something done intentionally by the architect in order to be clever.
However, I feel rather, that making the field of centers is quite hard. Although artists and builders of traditional society understood this well, often profoundly, present-day artists and architects often simply underestimate it, do not realize how hard it is, nor how profound it is.

When it comes to working out a building, achieving something which has living centers in it and in which living structure of the whole occurs is quite a trick.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/10 Always making centers#