Love of life

“Paying attention to the wholeness” is essentially synonymous with love of life. […] It means taking in the whole, enjoying it, seeing it all, bathing in it, loving it.

And I believe one can state truly that in traditional society, the actions, step by step, and small adaptations which make up the structure-preserving transformations are indeed born out of this awareness and love of everything around.

So in the end we don’t have a process problem or an architectural problem, but a problem of individualism and lack of feeling for others.

Even in the biggest buildings of traditional society, it is this love of life — love of the whole — which manifests itself in the smallest actions. It is, then, this love of life which is embodied in the conception of a building, in its detail, in its execution — because the wholeness that people paid attention to really was the whole, really was all of life, and people were not ashamed or too frightened to respond to all of it in their actions as builders.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/3 Structure-preserving transformations in traditional society#