Back to generated structure once again

The most fundamental thing about a living process is that the geometry of living structure is markedly different in kind from the geometry of design done on a drawing board or on the drafting system of a computer.

The geometry of living structure cannot be created by static design and production. […]
We cannot cheat. We cannot fake it. We cannot create unfolded living structure by drawing it as if it had unfolded and then building it by different means. It really must unfold, in real time.

In short, it is a shape arrived at by a beginning shape which is then operated on, transformed, operated on, transformed, many times over, by the laws of physics acting in concert, to differentiate the whole as a system, repeatedly, until in the end the shape reaches the one we know as the flattened falling drop. It is the history of this process, and the thousand steps which form this history, that create the shape.

The shape can be created by a computer simulation, because such a simulation, at least in principle, may resemble the real process by creating a succession of adaptations that build up the shape gradually. But it cannot be created by a static, non-dynamic act of draftsmanship or design. It is in the nature of the falling water drop that its shape can only be created dynamically.

This is not an intellectually derived conclusion. It is, I believe, a direct perception. We recognize that the shape arrived at in the plan of Rome is an especially complex shape, having a kind of geometric character, which can only be created by this step-by-step adaptive process.

It is the creation of the shape in time, step by step, which is fundamentally and categorically different from the shapes which are created stoically at the drawing board or by its design.

Insofar as unfolded buildings are lovable, what we love about them is not their age but the rightness which we experience in them. This rightness got into them as a result of a step-by-step unfolding process. We can see and feel the rightness. And we see it and feel it because it has a different geometric character from the character which is cerated by “design”.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/8 Step-by-step adaptation#