The style needed for unfolded, living form

The kinds of shapes which appear as a result of unfolding when it is done right, and which occur as a result of the processes we have been studying from chapter 6 to chapter 15, are highly specific in geometric type and character. The shapes are mainly rectilinear, but they include roughness, they include shapes in which angles are nearly square but not quite square; they necessarily include imperfect repetition, where one column and the next and the next are almost the same, but not quite the same, and each one is placed to make space positive, requiring that things were bent, adjusted, made carefully to fit the nature of an emerging whole. Twentieth-century form language did — and could do — none of this.

All this may sound obvious, but it is not. If you concentrate on it, I believe you will feel the unfolded character of what is there. We can feel that one thing was established, then another was established in relation to the first, and so on like that. Each smaller thing has been given its shape after, and in relation to, the larger thing that was established first. It is that which creates the harmonious feeling, since it is that which makes each part adapted and comfortable. The stair is gently ornamented, but simple. Each part is, more or less just right.
As a result, the building form has a very definite character. Yet it is a character without conscious of deliberate imagery. It is nearly what one might call a formless form. It arises from unfolding of differentiations and symmetries, and little else. This kind of form is necessary in order for unfolding of a building design to occur smoothly.
A prefabricated stair, for instance, cast in one piece in a factory, and lifted in by a crane, could not have this quality. It cannot look as if it has unfolded. And it cannot have the deep adaptation typical of an unfolded structure.

The form language which can support the creation and emergence of such an unfolded thing, must be made from elements and transformations which support, one by one, the various steps in the mergence of a whole. That requires something simple, and direct, but above all something which corresponds at every step to the kinds of thing which happen when a living structure is unfolded by differentiation from its context.

It would have to be a language of shapes, forms, differentiations and symmetries, which go just exactly to what is needed at each subsequent step. They would need to be simple, modest, small. And, certainly, the rules of the game needed for such a purpose are not the schemata which are being introduced today.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/16 Form language and style#