Other examples of structure-destroying transformations

For many reasons, the processes that came into use, and are still in common use today, permit, encourage — in many cases, even force on us — a variety of building processes which are not structure-preserving. Some are accidentally structure-destroying, caused by the fluctuating character of modern society. Some are based on rules which have to be followed by functionaries in highly mechanized institutions (banks, planning departments, construction companies, and so on) but which fail to encourage (or most often even to allow) adaptation to subtle circumstances of wholeness. Others are worse, and actively promote ugliness in the search for profit. Of course, greed is not new. But the late 20th-century search for profit took place under an entirely new set of conditions — that is, under conditions which were more likely to be structure-destroying than greed used to be, in Roman times, say, or in the medieval era.
Above all, the decisions about plans and design became based on institutions, procedures, concepts, theories, and ideas that were most often at odds with the wholeness that exists. Transportation has its own theories, and ways of calculating. Development has its pressures. Insurance forces rigid forms of exit and entrance on buildings. Building regulations force narrowly defined acceptable staircases. Methods of production force a type of mechanical imposition of grid-like arrangements on building shape. And, of course, there are a variety of pressures — from banking, industry, and other modern social institutions — which cut across the unfolding process more generally, and do not allow it to be structure-preserving.

Modern people are, very often, not holistic perceivers. Instead of seeing the wholeness and acting on it, they (especially if they are educated in verbal concepts at modern institutions) now perceive according to invented categories, which often blind them to the wholeness which exists.

And there is a further sense in which such planned communities, and indeed nearly all developer-built artificial communities, are based on structure-destroying transformations. This comes not from their failure to be consistent with the land where they are built, but merely from the fact that they are planned at all, rather than “grown”.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/4 Structure-destroying transformations in modern society - the failure of unfolding#