2 Position: How living process may be used to shape a room through its position

At an early stage in a building design process, the rooms are first established in position: usually, to start with, by name, size, and rough position. At this stage, conceptually, we may say that the rooms are (usually) rough rectangular volumes of space which have yet to be made “good”.

The centers which bring life to a room are larger features which lie beyond the boundary of the room. Rooms are given their life, first of all, by their position in the flow of people’s movement through the building, the light in the room, and their connection with the outer world beyond the windows — those are the three most salient.
By the nature of these things, they can only be settled early on, not later — before rooms have their position — before even the building has its overall ground plan fixed.

It is, above all, the light and relation to movement and relation to the whole which give quality and character to a room. So, if the fundamental process is being used, each room must be chosen to be a strong center in itself — and that will require that it occupies a definite position with respect to movement and a definite kind of light. And that — once applied to all the rooms — has profound effect on the building envelope — its perimeter. These relationships to the world beyond, which extend far from the fabric of the room itself, are settled at the outset and are dominant in determining the success of failure of the room.
Once a room is in position, with its size and location fixed, it is too late to give that room real feeling or true meaning if it does not already have it because of its position in the whole. Thus the life of the important rooms in a building must be decided at the very outset — much earlier than we imagine — very early in the design process when major rooms and building volume and perimeter are being fixed.

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