Geometric order

In order to achieve living structure, at a certain stage, it is necessary to seize hold of the building design and force it into an almost brutal, simple, massive geometric mold.
This happens when one is far enough along, so that can then almost view the building as pure art.
The elements of space are to be made positive. The sub-elements of space, they, too, are all to be made positive. The massive elements of which the space is to be composed, they, too, are to be made positive. By pushing these very positive and massive elements around, the building takes on its force. It becomes a pure act of art, where the masses — these rectangular and positive elements — are unfolded, and moved, and shaped, until they have a definite, strong syncopated harmony.
They will be repeated. Often what starts needs to be a tough and brutal repetition, which gets a rhythm going. Then these elements, their ratios, their proportions, their relations to one another, are varied to fit them to the context of the details, to give the whole thing life. At the same time, it is their spacing, the size and distance of the masses, and of the spaces between the masses — all looked at together — which then speak, which give out a subtle harmony — and a profound feeling from the strength of their definiteness.
These massive “stones”, then, create the elegance, coherence, and strength of the whole. This is the moment when the building becomes architecture.

All living processes use unfolding to create geometric order. Throughout my discussion of the features of living process, I have suggested again and again, how the unfolding of coherent order — especially through the use of the fifteen transformations — occurs continuously. It is no exaggeration to say that when we contemplate any living process at all, we always see that the length and breadth of the process will be suffused by steps through which a coherent geometry unfolds.
But the origin of its particular geometry varies with the type of system.
In the formation of water, it is the wave motion of the water which most clearly gives rise to the geometry.
In the formation of solids it is the coalescence and crystallization of periodic arrangements of molecules that provides this tendency.
In the formation of plants it is the successive unfolding of symmetrical leaf structures round the growing stem that provides the source of the order.
In the case of buildings (if the process is a living one) the fountain of geometrical order comes, above all, from building structure (columns, walls, beams, vaults, and so forth), specifically from the aperiodic, tartan-like grids which form the abstract underpinning of the building structure.
I will show in this chapter how it is ultimately the powerful formation of this structural core that provides a living building with its geometrical substratum.

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