The process of finding a good center

In the conventional wisdom of the mid-twentieth century (still active then, in 1982), it used to be normal to assume that every house had a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room, one for cooking, one for sitting, one for eating. But in the 1980’s I began to notice that almost all our clients experienced some kind of extreme discomfort with the separation of these three functions.

I found that discussion of these problems often caused genuine anguish in almost every family, because as they discussed it family members began to see that the real forces in their lives were just not consistent with these conventional rooms like the conventional living room and dining room they may have grown up with. And yet emotionally, they were still attached to them. People felt more and more distress as they found out that the reality of their own day-to-day lives was not consistent with their emotional attachments to a given system of centers. The centers in people’s minds were different from the ones in their actions.

We must see that what has happened here is something generic, not specific. The discussion was not about this particular house, and its geometry, as much as it was about the generic system of centers which made sense for this family, wherever they might live. Perhaps, by extension, it even touched questions of a general cultural nature, and how men and women in California were to live together. The new center which had been formed, the farmhouse kitchen, changed the generic system of centers in the culture, and changed — by implication — the houses which would be generated by the culture.

It is essential to realize that what happened in this case was not merely a redefinition of function (a phrase often used by architects). The process was powerful because it defined a new center — a center of function. Having arrived at an understanding of a particular center which must be in the house, our physical grasp of the essence of this house then became practical — and we were on the road to being able to make a house that would have a real life.
The example is typical, not just for houses, but for all kinds of building problems. It is the precise definition of building functions through new types of centers — and often the reconfiguration of the essential centers which have to carry the functions — which brings a project to fruition. It is not only a question of defining certain functions and then accommodating them in the geometry. It is a question of rearranging the functions, redefining the nature and meaning of the way the thing works — which suddenly opens the door to a new comfortable life, which will actually work.
In this example, we begin to see centers, not merely as nodes or central elements in a physical composition, but as nodes or centers of energy in the configuration of a life. As we see from the example, it is not enough to say that a building which comes to life solves its functional problems correctly. Instead the inner functions themselves, no less than the geometrical order, have to be rearranged, created as centers, so that the truth of the real forces in the system can unfold.
I hope it is clear to the reader that the process which created this insight was, in a new guise, once again the fundamental process. It was because we asked ourselves, collectively, “What next thing can we do that will positively affect the life of this household?”, and pursued this difficult question to its end, that we got the result, and were able to define this one new center — even though, at that stage, still abstractly.

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