7 Fine structure which determines the internal coherence and feeling in the room

In this work, the room is to the house as the house is to the land. Just as you have tried to make the volume of the house sit in the street or in the land to complete its wholeness and extend it, so now you must make the rooms of the house sit within the house and land together, completing them, extending them.
And as you do this, you must also start the unfolding of the physical structure of the building too, so that its columns, beams, walls, arches complete the volume of the rooms, just as the volume of the building completes the land — so that in the end all together, rooms, walls, windows, roofs, terraces, form a physical structure which completes and enhances the roughed-out volume of the house, just as the roughed-out house completes the roughed-out land which existed there before it.

To get the rooms right, finally — a place whose centers are themselves living — the physical, geometric, built structure of the room and its interior organization must together form living structure, too. That means that spaces, the organization of spaces, and now its counterpart, the organization of solid material, must together form a coherent living structure.
Although this seems obvious, and although it is part of the classic core of all traditional architecture — it is surprising how this has been almost lost and almost forgotten in the maelstrom of 20th-century work.
Here, once again, the fundamental process has a massive role to play. But in this case, the process of forging living centers, when it is focussed on the space and volume interaction of the structure, asks us to carve space, as if from rock, until the counterpart of space — the solid material structure that we think of as its physical container, its engineering structure — also comes to life to make each room alive.
Here the fundamental process obtains space and structure — the entity we may think of as “space-surrounding-structure” — from repeated application of the fundamental process to the volume of the building and to its emergent rooms and corridors and halls.

For instance, it is more important to get the rooms right, one by one, than it is to have a coherent “plan”. Don’t worry about trying to arrange the overall plan — that is not unfolding but manipulation. Instead, start with the most important room. Put it in the most important place, towards the garden, or the sunlight, or the river, or the street — whichever is most appropriate. Let it take its own form. Don’t worry about the rooms around it. Then do the same for the next rooms, get them right.
When you do things this way, some places will be a little bit of a shambles. There will be left over spaces, funny bits and pieces where you can put closets, toilets, storerooms. Don’t worry about the plan so much. Just make each part really beautiful, in its position, in its quietness (at the end of a passage for instance), in its light.
What you want most is for the individual rooms to be individually wonderful, glorious.

Suppose, for instance, that we have determined on a site, the best place for a certain major room. We have stood in that place, determined, from the inside, so to speak, that this is a good place, a beautiful spot, with a significant relation to the land. In the fundamental process we then take a next step to strengthen and embellish this center we have formed as a decision in our imagination.
Obviously, we want the light of that room to be beautiful. We must therefore clear away enough space around the edge of this room so that it will be possible to allow light in the room to be beautiful — we must make beautiful windows. Inevitably, then, the room has now taken a certain prominence in the emerging plan. It “sticks out”, it has a substantial part of its perimeter exposed, and that begins to shape the building around the room.

So, even before the building is fully designed, we have rather substantial ideas about several major and emerging centers in the room and connected to the room.

But now all these are understood as transformations on the physical material of the room — its walls, columns, ceiling, beams, floor, their thickness, their substance, their relief and depth.

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