Structure-preserving transformations as the origin of function

All functions, when they are working well in a building, are associated with living centers. This means that all the “functions” which are to be defined for a building need to be expressed as rules for making centers. And, above all, the choice of these centers is vital: To a very great extent, the finished project will be defined, controlled, in its behavior and its feeling, by the choice of key centers which are to appear in it.

The quality of human culture is embodied in the repeating centers which are current in a place. Indeed, as we know very well, the needs which people have in buildings are richly modified by culture.

Thus, the task of defining centers, for a new building, or for a neighborhood, is one of the deepest and most significant kinds of work which can be undertaken, in trying to establish a new way of life, and a physical environment which supports that way of life.

The process of choosing or defining functional centers, if it is to be part of a living process, must itself derive, then, in some fashion, from the existing wholeness. Like the elaboration of geometry itself, the pre-operational phase when the centers-to-be are being defined must be drawn from the existing wholeness by structure-preserving transformations.
What exactly does this mean? It means, mainly, that the centers that are to be injected into a new building project — the generic entities of patterns which are to be the building blocks of the project, and which are to define it — must come in large part from the human culture where the project is happening — and therefore, of course, from the culture that exists.
When we begin a building project, our clues about what should be built, what should be done next, must come not only from the land but from society, too, and from the culture where this is being done. We are faced with the empty canvas, and we puzzle about what to do. It is the human family which makes us build a house, it is the concept of transportation and community which makes us seek roads and sidewalks; it is the way that people are in their custom and behavior, which provides the all-important physical subtleties. So, the response to the land, even if it is to be structure-preserving, a true unfolding process, must be rooted, always, in the whole, in the cultural and human whole and the land and the ecological and natural whole and the physical wholeness of that place which forms the context of our work.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/13 Patterns#