A few invariants of rooms that have been shaped by living process

Individually, each room will most often be simple in shape, most often rectangular. If things are being done well, the odd-shaped rooms familiar from mid-20th-century designs will only very rarely appear. And when a room is indeed not rectangular, it will usually turn out to be a rectangle modified by the addition or insertion of other centrally symmetric components — a half octagonal bay, a small rectangular alcove, or a second rectangle combined with the first but retaining its existence as a center.
In the few cases where a room contains a major asymmetry, even then the composition of space will be such as to create a combination of locally symmetric centers combined to work within the overall asymmetry.
Most critical is the appearance within the room of a dominant, coherent center formed somewhere in the room by the positions of exterior, view, space, ceiling, and windows, so that there is a focal entity in the room: a place, a spot, a volume of space perhaps roughly as broad as it is tall, spherical in shape, of our own dimension, that makes a person want to be there.
The appearance of this invisible and useful center at the core of every room is the most subtle invariant of all since it depends on the presence, too, of other nearly hidden centers which make or break the structure of the room.
Many good rooms will, therefore, also have minor centers of a similar kind, supporting the main center and placed near windows or near other focal points.

In summary, four major process steps are needed to bring life to a room:

1. Choose the position so that room exists, beautifully, in relation to exterior garden, trees, to the entrance of the building, to the light.
2. Standing in the space which has been created by its position, conceive the main center and minor centers which will make this room alive for people who are in the room. These centers are primarily centers of space. They should be very concrete things: bay windows, seats, fire, bookshelves, a table, a protected spot, a beautiful window that draws you to it.
3. With the room volume fixed, attend to the filigree of wall surfaces, ceiling surfaces, visible structural elements that make the surface pattern of the room.
4. Finally simplify everything: simplify shape, simplify surface, simplify light, remove every non-essential, and choose each simplification carefully, to bring tranquility.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/13 The Character of Rooms#