Patterns as generic centers and the evolution of new culture
A living process only rarely creates living centers from scratch. In most cases, the living process makes use of solutions or partial solutions to previously encountered problems, in the form of pre-established coded schemes, or rules for making instances of generic centers. The process then uses these generic centers again and again as it encounters different real-world situations.
In organic nature, this is familiar. A gene is an organism’s way of remembering how to form previously successful adaptations in ensuing generations of new organisms. The gene essentially remembers, and allows re-use of, a generic solution to a recurring problem.
In architecture, traditional pattern languages played the same role. When we build a house, or a door, or a path, or a garden, these words describe worked-out culturally defined generic centers — pattern-like concepts which can be generated in a thousand forms to make actual centers in the world.
The good environments in traditional society could be built because people had pictures of what worked; these pictures were agreed upon, and used and re-used, over and again.
Memorized nuggets of solution, like the patterns in traditional society, like genes in the growth of organisms, are necessary to any complex adaptive system and its process.
Many of these present-day patterns did not lead to creation of living structure, but rather the reverse — because they were based on criteria for success such as profit or insurance or limited managerial efficiency, which had little to do with the fitness of the living structure as a whole.
In an investment-oriented economy, the profit motive can easily gain the advantage. Patterns which are good for profit, are easy to define. And they spread easily.
This is about (unintended?) consequences of certain incentives in place.
In our modern world, where societies are often in flux, the stability and coherence of such a traditional society is rarely found. Instead, people are usually struggling to create for themselves a system of coherent environmental objects and spaces, in which they can live well, be comfortable, and feel at ease.
But this means that people must create (artificially) what was taken for granted in traditional society: a system of patterns describing centers which can form the backbone of a new wholeness in a new society.
The process of finding these deep generalized culture-born centers, discussing them, evaluating them, settling on them, and then applying them to the construction of the world, is a major part of the work of creating any physical part of the world, large or small, collective or private. It is, necessarily, the first and most essential part of the general unfolding process which takes place as we construct our world.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/13 Patterns#