Summary so far
We see how the coherent geometry which makes the thing a unity, and which gives it beauty appears, step by step, as a result of differentiations caused and modified by the fifteen transformations. Throughout the process, these transformations essentially created the design.
Ideally, then, when things are going well, each center gradually gets shaped appropriately by successive differentiations, and is governed by the larger whole, which it embellishes and helps to shape, and from which it springs. When that happens, everything is going well, and living structure will emerge. […]
In cases where the process is less successful, the individual actions that arise within a larger whole are not shaped according to the nature of the larger whole, do not help it or enhance its life. Rather, they are locally unruly fragments (like cancer cells) which do too little locally to sustain and improve the whole.
An architecture succeeds — and we shall succeed in building living worlds in our cities — when there is a generative process which will allow each part to be shaped correctly, according to its local position, and in a way that guarantees it has a positive impact on the larger whole.
If we can work out rules of the game so that people all over the world — builders, bankers, lay people — can go forward, doing whatever they do in the world, repairing their surroundings, always accomplishing this one task, then the Earth’s environment will steadily be healed. Cities and buildings can become coherent and harmonious, merely as a result of following this rule.
Our aim, to generate a living world, need only to be to tame and redefine the rules of the game, to make them work so that all of us together, as we go about our business, can create a living whole.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/7 The fundamental differentiating process#