Freshness and deep adaptation — the class of living buildings

The places built were often far too mechanical, so that the result became rigid, tired, and stiff — sometimes even horrible — and was often lacking, altogether, in the real freshness and sweetness that makes us joyful.

This problem, precisely, is the legacy we have inherited from the 20th century, and it is that problem, above all, which I try to solve in this third book.

What makes a building fresh, alive, and joyful

For it is not style that makes a building living or dead, but the freshness of its response to its surroundings; the truthful and spontaneous unfolding of order within its own fabric.

What makes Aikido unique is that this response is non-mechanical, it is not within a system, rather it is always unique to circumstance. It grows out of the previous moment.

Indeed, the essence of all life in any system at all, lies in the adaptive response of each new development in the system to the previously existing state. […]

It cannot be achieved by a mechanical framework, by any mechanical system, nor by any stereotyped or stylistic response. Rather, it comes about only when the response of each act of building has been fresh, authentic, and autonomous, called into being by previous and present circumstance, shaped only by a detailed and living overall response to the whole.

Life is not only social but also, necessarily, geometrical. Life will come about only when each response is fresh, and each moment in the responding process truly builds something new and unexpected from a profound response to whatever whole existed just before. This, too, will be visible in the geometry, in the design.

The nature of these sequences is not to impose pre-fashioned order on things, but rather to extract what is new and fresh from the state of the world that exists.

That is the origin of the power of these sequences; that is their target; that is their goal.

And they do it in a surprising way. Although the adaptive sequences are highly ordered, and seem predefined, because they define steps and transformations in a disciplined sequence, it is the character of these sequences to help the user, the artist, the builder respond to what it there, rather than to impose on what is there. This is the remarkable power of the structure-preserving sequences.

Two morphological classes

Class 1: The class of buildings that are deeply adapted

• are all enormously and vastly different from one another
• yet somehow they are all deeply similar
• rely on deep adaptation as the ordinary process of production
• share deep mathematical structure of adaptation
• evoke deep feeling

Class 2: The class of buildings that are not deeply adapted

• many different shapes, materials, intentions
• yet all resemble each other
• not well-adapted structures, which lack the benefit of biological or social rigor and the desire to satisfy the human heart
• stem from the ego-hungry voices of architects who desire to be famous and wish to promote a product instead of from the inner voice of ordinary people or generated by the wrong kinds of mass production or crude over-technical processes that are cut off from all possibility of detailed fine adaptation
• its motives, intentions, images, geometry, and its geometric generating system have nothing essential to do with the life of humans, animals, or plants
• generally do not evoke deep feeling

The buildings in these two classes […] are utterly different, both in artistic substance and in morphological substance. […]

What the difference really has to do with, are two different expressions of the purpose and intent of architecture, two different sets of assumptions and procedures. The difference lies in the structure which results from the assumptions and procedures.

The structure of the buildings in Class 1 and the structure of the buildings in Class 2 are quite different, not because of shape, or culture, or climate, but because of the deep, inner nature of their structure-generating assumptions, and specifically because of the way they deal, or do not deal, with adaptation.

The buildings in Class 2 are not well-adapted structures. They represent a new brand of fantasy, so clearly marked that it is almost a commercial brand, glued on, somehow, to the products of our early first-stage industrial civilization, lacking the benefit of biological or social rigor, lacking the desire to satisfy the human heart, not stemming from the inner voice of ordinary people, but stemming instead (very often) from the ego-hungry voices of architects who desire to be famous — and who wish to promote a product.

In other cases similar buildings may be generated by the wrong kinds of mass production, or by crude over-technical processes that are cut off from all possibility of detailed fine adaptation.

The buildings which come from adaptation — continuous, patient adaptation, concern with wholeness and nothing else — have a certain discernible structure. That is because adaptation goes towards certain structural features in a building. The buildings which have these features are not modern, or ancient, to historical: they just happen to form a definable mathematical class, and specifically, a definable class of forms. This class includes very few of the buildings being praised in our time.

There is no inherent reason why buildings of our era should not be deeply adapted, and should not therefore be Class 1 buildings in their geometric structure. There is no reason, either, why many of them should not be made of ultra-high-tech materials. What matters is their ability to contain and exhibit the intricate deep structure of an adaptively made thing.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/Author’s note#