4 Position: The living room of the Medlock House

Next, perhaps most crucial in trying to understand what is to become of a given building volume — as it has manifested on the site — is to form a vision of the inside of the building, a vision of moving through it — where the open places are, where the stopped, quiet, places are, where it is light, where it is dark, where you stay in, where you go out.

Go into your mind’s eye pretending to walk through the building, as if it existed already, but you are seeing it for the first time and are stunned by its beauty. You are genuinely surprised. You find yourself stunned by the beauty of the rooms. And you ask yourself, then, Which features of what I am seeing, are making it so beautiful?
That is what you are trying to find out. Usually, in my experience, when you do it like this, you do see things you had not thought of, or were not aware of. Thus you find out, for the first time, by examining what has autonomously presented itself to your own mind’s eye, what it takes to make the rooms as beautiful as you want them to be.
But you must ask yourself these questions as if you had come to the building for the first time:
Where do I go?
What do I come to?
What do I see next?
If you start by making your mind a blank, and then ask yourself these questions, with your eyes closed, you can see what is needed, what is going to happen. It comes to you directly, without effort, as if you know it already.

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