12 Wabi-to-sabi: the balance of rough and smooth

To get exactness of adaptation, there is a price to pay. The price is roughness. To get the perfect adaptation which is required by the unfolding of a field of centers, you cannot avoid a certain roughness in the results. That is because, to make each center come to life, there needs to be give and take that permits the needed complex superposition of relationships: hence uneven, unequal spaces, lines, straightness, curvature and so on. It is not possible to get perfection in the field of centers — true life — and also have the shallow mechanical perfection which 20th-century people often seemed to demand of buildings.
In present-day construction, especially in America, people in general — and contractors too — have become accustomed to buildings with an almost fanatical level of finish. […] They conform to a mechanical ideal of perfection. Why? Not for any practical reason.
Indeed, the attention needed to achieve this mechanical perfection drives out the possibility of paying attention to real perfection or real adaptation in the centers.

Unless there is a balance between those things which are done with great care and those things which are done more roughly, it is impossible to build order of the kind described within any ordinary budget. True spirituality in a building is achieved when there is a balance of perfection and roughness. It is the phenomenon which the Japanese call wabi-to-sabi: rusty beauty.

We must always allow the essential thing to lead the inessential. We concentrate on the essential and let the inessential trail behind.

It is in the nature of spirit to make a beautiful and special thing where a beautiful and special things is required, and to offset it with a simple inexpensive thing. That is the most humble way to make it, and the beauty then shines out because of it.
[…] You cannot afford to make careful, expensive things everywhere. It is necessary to choose, to divide up the money in the best way, to make one part glorious, and make another part humble to pay for it.
The key lesson in all this is simple and extreme. The field of centers cannot be created as a by-product of some existing process. It will come about only when the entire process of making is organized and concentrated on just this one thing: to create a living field. If you concentrate on something else, you get something else.

Roughness is a deeper kind of perfection; technical perfection is meaningless

We have become accustomed to a wrong-headed, almost fanatical, precision in the construction of buildings. Our tilework, for instance, is required to be perfectly aligned, perfectly square, every tile cur perfectly, and the whole thing accurate on a grid to a tolerance of a sixteenth of an inch. Yet our tilework is dead and ugly, without soul. A modern American tile-setter who has learned to get his satisfaction from the perfection of squareness, the perfection of plumb, and the perfection of the regularity of the tiles, can never achieve the same result as the old Mexican tile-setter did on that shimmering blue house. He cannot achieve it even if he knows the field of centers and understands it. The reason is that so long as the tile-setter’s mind is occupied with technical perfection, he cannot concentrate on the field of centers — and so the living field will not spring to life in his work. There is not room for both. This is not because they are inconsistent. It is simply because you cannot concentrate on two goals, both so big, yet so different, at the same time.

In our era, many of us have been taught to strive for a meaningless perfection. To get wholeness, you must try instead to strive for a perfection where the things which matter less are left more rough, and the things which matter more are given deep attention. The result seems imperfect. Yet, in fact, what seems like roughness is a deeper kind of perfection.

If you pay attention to what is really important, less important parts may look rough. This doesn’t mean that we didn’t know how to “do it properly”. It simply means we put most of our effort into something more important.

We can’t be more susceptible to this mistake in technology. How often do we spend too much time on the wrong, unimportant details? And how often do we not even differentiate between what parts are more important than others? Once we decide to work on something, so if it doesn’t fall of the to do list, do we really distinguish between more of less important parts of a program?

They spent their effort in the way which made the most difference, and they produced a wonderful quality, this harmony, simply because that is what they paid attention to and what they tried to do.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/15 All Building as Making#