Formation of brutal and massive chunks in the visitor’s center at West Dean

You can see that the force of the building, as it was finally built lies in this nearly brutal effort to seize hold of the rectangular bays, bring them to order, make each rectangle continuous with the others, yet distinct. They are simple, and all in a row. Yet the spacing of the walls is unequal.
The syncopated spacing and the thickness of the transverse walls are not arbitrary, but caused by necessary positions which relate to the structure. And, all in all, what has happened is that now we have a system of positive entities — the main rectangular volume, the smaller rectangular volumes, the space, the walls themselves — forming a series of levels of scale. All very simple, yet as a whole, complex, and having a certain majesty.
It gets its weight as a building because the conception of the arrangement has been intensified, and made into something emotionally real, by the injection of the structure, and its beauty, its main massive elements. The transformation that took place was that the carcass, the building structure in itself, was made into a beautiful thing, not merely a structure, but a beautiful structure, guided by the process of its making as a beautiful thing in itself. That is a huge statement, and is the essence of the transformation.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/15 Emergence of formal geometry#