Deep feeling must be the core of living process

During the early part of the 20th century there was a school of thought where a great deal was said about artists expressing their feelings, as if this was supposed somehow to be the purpose and pathway of art. Artists sometimes tried to do this by placing paint to record their emotions, throwing paint at the wall, pouring their emotions into the work. In each case the artist tried to send his feeling into the work, in the name of: “I am expressing my feelings.” In all these cases the idea was that the feeling goes from the artist into the work while the work is being made.
Producing a building which has feeling is something different. […]
It is not important whether the architect’s feeling goes toward the building. What matters is that the building — the room, the canyon, the painting, the ornament, the garden — as they are created, send profound feeling back towards us.
It means that if I am the builder I set out to produce a neighborhood, or a landscape, or a building, or a window as if it was an instrument, as a specific geometrical substance which will work back on me or on any other person and create feeling in me or in that person.
The feeling comes from the object back to me after it is made, does not go from me to the object while I am making it.
Here the question all the time is: Within the step that I am taking now, can I take the next step in such that way that the evolving work has its deep feeling increased the most?
What step, of all possible steps, will add the most to the feeling we experience when we are in or near that place?

In the course of using this method, we shall also find, from time to time, that as we move forward, before we take an action, we can grasp the latent structure as an emotional substance, we may feel it as a vision — a dimly held feeling which describes where we are going, but is not yet concrete, in physical and geometrical terms. This means we can sense, ahead of time, the quality of the completed whole — even when we cannot yet visualize it. We then keep this quality alive in our minds and use it as the basic guiding light, which steers us towards our target. The final target, then, has the feeling which we anticipated much earlier, but often has an unexpected, unfamiliar geometry.

The feeling which steers us in this fashion is a vision — but it is not an arbitrarily invented vision. It is a vision of something we may call the emotional substance of the coming work, a feeling which arises in us, as a response to the wholeness which exists. It is therefore reasonably accurate, reliable, and stable. We can get it, and then keep on coming back to it. It evolves, as the project does, and as our concrete understanding evolves. Thus, as the geometry develops, the feeling is kept intact, but becomes more and more solid — provided we do not depart from the feeling that existed in us at the beginning. So, this feeling which guides us is our response to the wholeness — first to that wholeness which existed at the beginning. Subsequently it is our response to the wholeness as it evolves and emerges from our actions. It is our knowledge of what kind of thing is needed to complete that wholeness, and make it more alive.

It is something real and substantial in the world. But even though it can be described as a mathematical structure, it is too complex to take in by purely analytical means. In order to get the whole, to grasp it, one must feel it. Its wholeness can be felt. Using our own feeling as a way of grasping the whole, we can put ourselves in a receptive mode in which we grasp, and respond to, the existing wholeness — together with its latent structure.
This is not an emotional move away from precision. It is, rather, a move towards precision.

The feeling we seek is a condition in which the artist, builder, or participant opens himself to the whole, allows the whole to appear within him, and allows it to act within him: It is, then, the feeling which arises from the work itself.
Above all, that which is latent, the structure just below the surface that is “trying” to appear, can be felt. And this is the core of what must be observed, felt, and perceived in order to make structure-preserving transformations feasible.
Thus, during a living process, feeling is being used as the surest and most reliable way for the artist or builder to receive the wholeness, nourish it, and respond to it, preserve it, and enhance it.
From the feeling that exists in us as our reaction to the wholeness that was originally there, we progress, step by step, towards a geometry which induces in us, a more and more intense feeling.
I judge my success as an architect, at each moment and at every step in the emerging process, by the degree to which the work, as far as it has gone, intensifies my feeling when I am there — and, by extension, intensifies the feeling of every other person, too.
That is the essence of living process. It is a movement towards a structure which is precious. And, above all, it is a movement toward a structure which makes us feel our own existence most deeply.

Interwoven meanings of the word “feeling” in a living process

1. I am talking about feeling as a way of grasping the wholeness of a situation. We grasp wholeness by feeling it, we obtain a nearly visceral feeling of the whole which puts us in touch with the whole.
2. I am also talking about a feeling of what to do next — at any given instant in the unfolding of the whole. This feeling, too, is generated in us as a feeling. We confront the whole, look at it, in the state it has reached, and we can feel where it wants to go where it should go as its unfolding continues.
3. I am also talking about the importance of the idea that a building or any made object, when it has life, creates — generates — deep feeling in the person who encounters it. This principle that a thing, given life, has the obligation and function in the world to induce deep feeling in people — that is a third ingredient of my discussion.
4. Fourth is the fact that while making something, and when it is begun, or not yet finished, sometimes before it is begun, we carry the feeling, in the form of a dimly held vision of emotional substance. We begin with a dim awareness, and we carry that dim awareness with us, as we move forward through concrete acts of structure-preserving unfolding to generate a new and vigorous whole.
5. Fifth is the fact that this feeling or vision of emotional substance comes into our minds from the whole which exists. It is the existing whole that inspires the feeling of vision of what it might become as it unfolds. This is why feeling helps us to perform structure-preserving transformations. By following feeling, we are able to come close to the process of structure-preserving unfolding that must characterize the living process.
6. We have the fact that as artists, or as citizens, we need to be aware that any made thing — building, room, street, or ornament — has the obligation to create experience of deep feeling in us. We may think of this by saying that the thing itself has feeling when it lives.
7. Finally, there is always a structure latent in any given wholeness. This latent structure is the weakly held system of centers that are not quite defined yet, only partly articulated as a structure — yet which carry the inspiration of what this thing might be, where it might go. Every wholeness carries within it this “vector” in time, pointing in some direction, and indicating where it might go. This is the most important aspect of wholeness, and the reason we must try to “feel” the structure when attempting structure-preserving transformations, hence every step of a living process. That, too, is experienced by us as feeling.

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