A new whole emerges: life v. mechanism — the essence of unfolding wholeness
The obligation of the building is to help the street; the obligation of the fireplace is to help the room; the obligation of the wall is to help the roof; the obligation of the building is to help the garden; and of the garden to help the street.
It is this endless, upward-streaming hierarchy which produces life.
Everything in living process is meant only to underline this idea, and to show what it means to make this practical in buildings. I am proposing that in the course of planning, conceiving, designing, and making something, throughout that process we have a single step-wise process which may have 10 steps or 500 steps or 100,000 steps — but the essential nature of each step is exactly the same. It has only one purpose: to allow the wholeness to unfold correctly, through feeling and by creating feeling.
In a house, if we make one decision a minute over a two-year period, there may be as many as a quarter of a million decisions. For a big project there are many more. In a painting, where you sometimes make one decision a second for several hours, there may be several thousand decisions made even in a day. Even if there are a million steps, and a million wholenesses which I pass through on my way to making something, I still use the same fundamental process, the same operation, for every one of these million steps. In every step, I try to increase the feeling in the thing.
For some, this living process, based on the feeling which the whole creates, might merely be thought of as a general criterion that moves us forward through the art of building. But it is more than a criterion. It is an active principle, a particular and definite kind of action, which starts at the particular stage you have got to, and propels you forward to the next stage. It doesn’t matter whether this propelling forward takes one second, or six weeks, or sixty years: What guides it and propels it is the same.
Just why a building which is profoundly based on feeling, should solve, simultaneously, these seemingly unrelated functional aspects is a profound mystery. This mystery touches the most unexpected aspects of the nature of space and the nature of matter, and will be examined in Book 4, chapter 2. For the time being, I simply want the reader to be conscious that an approach rooted in feeling will go to the most vital practical nature of environmental structure. It engages the underlying nature of the whole environment, the most fundamental aspect of the physical world.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/14 Deep feeling#