The footsteps of Thomas Kuhn — A vital need to reconsider the rules which govern social process

Thomas Kuhn became famous for describing the seasick feeling one has, when in the midst of a shift of paradigm.

There was, too, a far deeper problem. Students who had been trained in our program understood, as a matter of course, that value was a matter of substance, something to be worked through and discussed. Yet visiting architect-professors from the rest of our department still assumed (according to the older paradigm) that there was no such thing as value (as an objective thing), and rather that each person should be free to go in whatever direction he liked and thought interesting.
Thus faculty visitors to my classes, who almost inevitably came with that theme in mind, often forced us to go through an agonizing (and for us time-wasting) explanation and debate often lasting several hours since they did not agree with the philosophy of value they heard put to them by students trying to explain their projects — all simply because of the difference in initial assumptions about whether value actually exists or not.
The examples of incommensurable ideas ranged from minor to enormous. You may see what a devastating lack of communication existed even in a university setting, one supposedly conducive to reasoned discussion. How much worse, and how much more serious, this problem is, when it arises in a real-world setting, where one tries to make these changes and innovations in process against the backdrop of present-day procedural assumptions in planning, architecture, and construction. It is relevant to consider these difficulties, because they are surface manifestations of the very deep inconsistency between thinking about living process and the present organization of society as reflected in current training of architects.

You risk a great deal when working within a new paradigm which includes a) human relationships of trust, b) on-going decisions about trade-offs, c) the overall wisdom of how to spend a given modest amount of money to get the best from your money.
It is risky within the current system based on a) legalisms b) blueprints and contracts that preclude sensible adaptation, c) profit and gain, and d) too little human trust.
People who attempt to do these things will be in jeopardy when they attempt to do them within the present system.

All in all, for more than forty years I have had the experience that — on any given issue — three times out of four, what I instinctively wanted to do because I thought is was right, was at odds with somebody’s picture of how things ought to be. For years, this seemed like a coincidence. Sometimes it seemed to my friends that I was just plain stubborn, ornery, “against everything” — that I had a built-in desire to be in conflict with people. But then, gradually — and only fully in the last ten or fifteen years — it began to sink in that this apparent sources of conflict had a straightforward origin. It came about, because my instincts were governed, as often as I found possible, by respect for life, respect for wholeness in the world (at least up to the limitation of my own ability to see it). What I did came from my desire to see the whole, and my desire to build according to the whole, and my refusal to give up on the whole.

Of course the adventures which I have been living for more than forty years, now, and the observations I have made, might still be attributed to the monomania of a solitary individual, over-zealous, who had a blindness to the format and procedures that are proper in the worlds of architecture and society.
But it is more appropriate, I think, to see that the vast 20th-century net of interacting processes that we inherited, and now accept as normal, was indeed deeply abnormal and against life. It is our obligation to do what we can to reject these defunct processes, to transform them, to fight with every breath against them, and to search in our daily actions, for all the means we need to preserve the sacred quality of our life and the life of our cities and our planet, and to seek a new form of processes in which we can be whole.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/19 Massive process difficulties#