The whole
Let us say, then, that extension, enhancement, and deepening of the whole is the crux and target of all living process. Living processes have to do with the creation of wholes. Artistically, the essence of the builder’s art, is always to create a whole. When a building succeeds, it is because we perceive it, feel it, to be a magnificent whole, whole through and through, one thing.
It is not common to find this today. We may even say that the ugliness we see all around us, comes largely from the fact that builders — architects, contractors, developers — no longer know, or only rarely achieve, the making of a building which is truly one with its surroundings.
Thus, whatever a living process has to say about architecture, whatever it can teach us, and whatever it can give us, above all it must give us this: the ability to make a living whole.
We cannot make something whole, for example, unless we make it united with its surroundings. So, to be whole, it has to be “lost”, that is, not separate from its surroundings, part and parcel of them. And the pieces within a living whole, they must also have a special quality. So, the thing which is to be whole, and extends out into the world around it, must also contain wholes within it, and these smaller wholes must be part of the larger whole in feeling. So each is to be distinct, to be an entity. Yet is is to be invisible in order to be lost and not separate from the larger whole.
Not-separateness in app development is for instance achieved by integrating into the target platform instead of building something with a cross-platform framework which then sticks out as foreign on at least some of the targeted platforms, if not all of them.
So if we hope to be like nature (and we can hardly aspire to anything stronger) we should, in principle, be able to extract the whole in what we make, derive the whole — the shape and substance of our work — always going step by step, and by concentrating, at every stage, on the emergence of a new, living, breathing, feeling, whole.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/9 The whole#