Regularity: fact and fiction
Ultimately, all order and all form come from repetition.
Thus everything in the geometry of the world is essentially organized repetition.
The final target of unfolding is to find and create just those repetitions which are required — and from them, to give birth to form. Hierarchy and repetition, of an organic not mechanical kind, ultimately create the architecture of the whole.
But when a process is a living process, the repetition is of a very special kind, quite different from the mechanical kind of repetition we learned to recognize in the 20th century.
During the 20th century, our ideas about repetition and uniqueness were distorted, I believe, by two important but erroneous strands of thought.
First, by a conviction (often carried by architects) that it was inevitable that a modern industrial process could only make exact replicas, if it was to be efficient, via mass-production. […]
On the surface, we were led to believe that this kind of modular repetition had to be introduced by architects for reasons of efficiency, speed, and so on. But more deeply, I believe, it was an aesthetic idea, a philosophical ideal, an intellectual extension of the ideas of mechanism.
Second, our concept of repetition was distorted by a conviction about atoms and fundamental particles, which seemed to provide a basis for thinking that the world is, in its essence, modular. […]
As the 20th century came to its second half, the intellectual bias of the century was often mixed with the philosophical (and practical) dream of a small number of components which could be combined in infinite richness of arrangement to create beautiful things.
One must come to expect that each atom and each particle will be different according to its context, and that there are no ultimate identical constituents of matter at any scale.
When a living process is working, it creates a very special kind of geometrical order in which every part is whole, unified, and in which every part is unique, according to its conditions. This is a particular type of geometry which, though highly regular, makes every part unique because it is consistent with its context, not only with its essential character.
The non-modularity of the living world is a necessity of the world’s structure, that the world cannot have living structure unless it has this feature. In a living world every part must be different and unique according to its conditions.
There is something in the uniqueness-filled geometry of the living structure which is precious, subtle, goes to the core of things. The living structure is based on the fact that every part is unique: Not merely that the cells inside the flowers are unique, but that the atoms in the cells are also unique, all according to their orientation and location.
So, in a living structure, we have a configuration which is unique and highly defined in its details, in this all-encompassing utterly beautiful way. From the electrons to the atoms to the branch itself — it and all its elements are unique and precious. Yet it is all repeating.
It is very important to observe that repetition in the world is inevitable, since indeed similar conditions do keep recurring, and since similar conditions will keep spawning similar configurations. […]
Calm repetition, the calm beauty of the rows of vines in a vineyard, is of the essence of living structure. But the operative word is similar, not same. For the vineyard to be living, the rows must be very similar. But for it to be living, they must not be the same.
Nothing that is made by combining rigidly identical modules, can have this kind of living structure.
Living structure is not merely context-sensitive at a single level. If a system is truly context-sensitive at every level, from the largest to the smallest, each part is unique, because all of it, throughout its fabric, has been generated in this marvelous way that makes each part perfectly adapted to its position, just right, and perfectly unique at its place in the world.
Dee in our hearts, I suspect we know that every situation is unique, each person, each moment, and therefore each place, must be unique. To live in a world which denies this truth, by creating an appearance of sameness, and then perhaps forcing us unique creatures into that mold of sameness, is degrading and impossible to bear.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/12 Every part unique#