3 Microstructure of a building

The field of centers is a convenient way of representing the substance in our minds. It is the substance itself which actually creates the field. Life will not exist in a building unless it exists in the actual physical fabric of the building, in all the details of the way the thing is made. The actual physical geometry of the foundation, walls, windows, roof edge, boards, tiles, plaster, paint work, moldings is itself crucial to the existence of life. The sensuous quality of the building comes from its detail; substance is fundamental to beauty. Wholeness will not exist in the large unless it also exists in the small… and for it to exist in the small, it must be made.

The coherence of a field of centers cannot “stop” at some arbitrary dimension and be faked from there on down like a Hollywood stage set. The big field of centers will only be coherent if the microstructure which supports it is coherent too. This means that the field of centers must continue down, all the way from the large scale to the scale of the very small, even to the atoms and molecules in the construction materials.
Thus the proper construction of a building, the actual making of the elements of a well-made work, cannot merely be the implementation of a design which is already clear down to the smallest detail. It is, necessarily, a living process in which the microstructure of the field of centers gets created, formed, imagined, adapted, and produced.

#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#