Appendix: the hard work of creating an engine that produces genuine feeling

I cannot emphasize strongly enough, that the production of a work which has feeling, may be imagined as the creation of an engine which makes this certain kind of feeling. It is careful, empirical, cool-headed. It succeeds, or not, in the degree to which this created engine is able to work, function successfully — that means that when the engine is finished the feeling appropriate to the context pours out from the engine, just as is appropriate to the place and time where the engine is placed. The hard work involved, the coolness of this work, is perhaps the most surprising thing, which must be understood by any architect.

I began the picture by making a few small sketches of a handful of anemones in a jar. In each of these small sketches I was really just drawing the flowers as I first saw them, but looking for some glimpse in the work, of the kind of geometrical engine, which would be capable of creating the feeling which I have just described in the onlooker. These sketches are rough, hasty, and were made only in an effort to explore the possible geometric order which might create feeling: thus, as diagrams of the possible “engine”, to find out what kind of engine will work successfully.

It is the geometrical engine which does the work, and which creates the feeling of the color. That is what has to be created in any work of building. To find the geometric engine, the profound geometry, which will create the feeling actually needed in the building as a whole.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/14 Deep feeling#