6 Overview of the unfolding process for the three houses

With each family, by the end of a one-hour conversation, I had built up a fairly complete picture of each house, both in my own mind and in the minds of the two people I was talking with.
As you can see from this process, the design, in each case, came largely from them. Certainly, the inspiration came from them. But I asked the questions and it was my way of putting these questions, in the order that I asked them, which made sure each house really did unfold in a nice orderly fashion. That is what made it a living process. The unfolding was smooth. Each time it was my questioning (both my persistence, and the sequence of my questions) which brought all of us three (the two family members in Austin and me in Berkeley) to the point that we had a coherent structure emerging, in each case, and that we could, all three, visualize the same emerging whole.

If the questions had been different, and I had been less experienced, we might easily have spoken for an hour, reached some ideas, and then, I would have had to go away and “design” the house. But instead (because I really managed to get the house to unfold in this question-and-answer process) by the time the hour had passed, we all had a grasp of the same fairly coherent whole: a plan that worked, founded on an emerging inspiration that came from them.

1. You need to have at least a rough a pattern language worked out ahead of time — that means you have discussed the generic features which the house will have, and have written them down in a set of patterns you want in the house.
2. You do the whole thing with your eyes closed.
3. You must help your clients to concentrate on the emerging whole while it is going on, and always be alert to what it is about the quality of the whole, as a whole, which is most in need of clarification as the whole continues to unfold. It is chiefly this alertness and concentration which allows a coherent house plan to come out of it.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/12 The uniqueness of people’s individual worlds#