2 Physical substance itself

In Book 1, I spoke about the abstract nature of a building: the centers which form it. Then in Book 2 and the first chapters of this book, I discussed the way in which the geometrical conception of the building is formed: first its volume as an enhancement of the site; then the internal organization, rooms, and engineering structure. Now we come to the materials and detail.

We need to get a conception of the building as a real made thing: an assembly, a creation of material. It is in this phase, the conception and making of the building, where the building finally takes shape as something solid and worthwhile.
The essential question that must be posed at this moment in the evolution of the building, is whether the building details — the bits and pieces we touch, put together, and form — are themselves living centers.
By the end of the 20th century this had become especially hard to do. We had lived through a period, in the last seven decades, where buildings were conceived on paper, and then built without regard for centers — often from cheap fast materials that are largely insubstantial.

The building can only amount to something as a living thing when the various physical elements which appear in the building are profound centers. That will only happen when every wall, column, beam, capital, base, seat, window, door, board, tile — every part of the physical material and every connection — takes on its character as a profound center. Indeed, in the realm of building, that is the essence of the making art.

It requires something entirely different from studs and plywood and sheetrock, different from prefabricated panels or concrete blocks. It requires that every part be thought of as a beautiful thing in itself, where the physical material of which it is made is shaped and treasured as a thing. Only when that feeling is carried through, throughout the building, will there be something in the building that is worthwhile.
I may express the idea simply with the observation that the field of centers does not stop at any one level of scale. In a thing which has life, the wholeness goes through all levels of scale, and must go ultimately even to the crystalline and molecular levels. For life to occur, even at the larger levels, the microstructure must also be wholesome and well organized. This can happen only when we have the same level of control and carefulness in the realm of the construction entities as we do at the scale of rooms and buildings. It cannot happen otherwise. In short, the wholeness of a building cannot be fully understood only as a matter of color and geometry. It must have physical substance too.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World# #book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/14 Construction elements as living centers#