What is really happening in such a case
It is my experience that this “successful” structure can be generated, with fair certainty, by people who know what they are doing, if they follow an orderly differentiating process to do this “brutal” thing.
It is after all also true that nearly all great traditional buildings contain such successful structure, making us believe that this differentiating process must have been a predictable and reliable process.
It is also true, of course, that such middle-range order appears, without fail, in biological structures of all sorts, again making it virtually certain that there must be a predictable process which can create such an order, and which does create it reliably in biological cases.
What is the essence of this process for buildings?
First, the volume is already fixed. Let us hope that it is a good volume, a majestic exterior volume, which is simple. That is a major statement. Even a gigantic building must still be made of a relatively simple series of exterior volumes which form a single largest center. [-> Book 3, chapter 4]
Second, we have a rough idea of the way space is to be disposed inside this volume. In broad terms, we have divided the thing up into areas and positions, possibly including exterior areas or spaces. [-> Book 3, chapters 6, 7, 13, 14]
Then comes the crucial step when orderly geometry of structure is introduced. We apply, to this configuration of roughly conceived spaces, a special kind of sharpening process: we use it to construct the simplest aperiodic grid consistent with the harmony and variety of the building plan. The aperiodic grid is a grid of parallel lines, not necessarily equally spaced, but parallel as far as possible, chosen so that all the main spaces or groups of spaces fit inside the grid. It is natural that this aperiodic grid contains both thick grid bands and thin grid bands, distributed in a harmonious way so as to form boundaries and levels of scale in a natural fashion.
If the grid has to be adjusted to make up for non-rectilinear aspects of the building volume (curves, or non-90-degree angles) imposed by exterior conditions, the grid is tweaked to adjust to these configurations by juxtaposition of slipped grid lines.
Consider, then, the following process.
It starts with the creation of a building volume in the land (application of [roughness], [positive space], [good shape] transformations).
That is followed by another process in which rough “cells” or internal volumes are made to fill this exterior volume — so far only roughly, but so that proportions, relative areas, and position are about right (application of [levels of scale], [local symmetries] transformations).
And that then is followed by a process of making a syncopated grid, which makes the disposition of volumes regular (but irregular), and which, at the same time creates boundaries, levels of scale, and alternating repetition, through creation of massive elements which are themselves felt and seen as living centers (application of [roughness], [positive space], [levels of scale], [boundaries], [alternating repetition] transformations).
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/15 Emergence of formal geometry#