8 A letter to the reader

If you want, at a single step, to make the biggest difference in the life of a building, it is through the building elements that you are most likely to come to it. You must make sure that the building, as a made thing, is an object with beautiful meaning which has weight, substance, and feeling in its details. Then it can begin to be something.
This task, so easy to define, is, in practice, often immensely hard. There is no modern tradition to support it, so one is on one’s own, trying to invent, create, make living centers out of materials and structures conceived and sold to be not-living and mechanical.

It has nothing to do with archaic techniques. Indeed, it is likely that the ways this is most likely to be done successfully, will be new techniques, ultra-modern techniques, that make use of the most advanced, subtly controllable processes.
If Mozart were alive today, you can be sure he would be using the most advanced computers to make music, and somehow, would infuse joy and love into that process. Just so, the advanced forms of control, which allow human beings to shape matter directly, and which allow us to fabricate, shape, and adjust material, on-site, to make a building beautiful — all this belongs to the future.

In order to do this in the 21st century, one has to be extremely inventive. For example, suppose I say that I want to make a column which means something, which has weight and value as a living center. Almost at once I must ask myself the question; how can I make a column twice as thick as a normal one without making it four times the price — because typically it will contain four times as much material, hollow perhaps, but it must be a true thing, solid, too. This poses technical and financial questions of a serious order. I have to be prepared to tackle these questions, think about them, perhaps invent new ways of making beautiful columns at a reasonable and normal price.

No matter the cost in effort, if you are an architect, you must solve this problem. Without solving it, there can be no architecture.

The construction industry developed details which were in no way connected to the issues raised in this book, but supportive, instead, of mechanical ideas of efficiency. So the motive of even seeking to make building details with substance, spirit, life was largely missing.
At the same time, the new kind of process needed to re-create such conditions is not yet widely accepted. Nor does the kind of process exist as a part of normal construction operations which could create these kinds of details as a matter of course in the construction industry.
It is the need for this combination of events which creates the almost superhuman nature of the task of reintroducing “making” into architecture, yet doing this in a way which emerges from the technology of our time.

#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#