Gradual progress toward living structure

Possibly the most basic and necessary feature of any living process is the fact that it goes gradually. The living structure emerges, slowly, step by step, and as the process goes forward step by step there is continuous feedback which allows the process to guide the system towards greater wholeness, and coherence, and adaptation.

Neither the process of design, not the process of construction work like this. Instead there is a conception of a desired end-state (the design), and the system of architectural and constructional processes is geared up to producing this desired end-state, efficiently, and at all costs as it was initially defined — almost entirely without realistic feedback and improvement and adaptation while the processes are going on.

In any case, the core of all living process is step-by-step adaptation — the modification and evolution which happen gradually in response to information about the extent to which all emerging structure supports and embellishes the whole. It is a necessary, unavoidable core.

The procedural context in which these giant 20th-century projects were taking place — even the design process itself during its early stages — simply did not permit step-by-step adaptation to occur, not during design, not during construction, nor indeed after construction or during maintenance.

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