3 What matters is that we have techniques of construction which help us make living centers
The biggest issue is adaptability. Materials and methods of construction must be of such a kind that they can create details freely enough to intensify the field of centers at every point. And the materials must allow builders to have direct human control over every evolving center and thus to make each one, in some sense, “by hand”.
We need to look for those new materials which have superior performance, are truly “modern” as materials, and yet have the character needed to support fine-scale adaptation and unfolding.
The processes must allow each center freedom to develop according to its context, in a fashion which cannot be predicted when the construction starts. To achieve this, we have to use methods which allow the gradual formation of centers, one by one, under conditions which allow each center to become whole according to its place within the field.
Not all material systems can do this easily. For example, stud-wall construction and concrete-panel construction make adaptation difficult. In these techniques the builder assumes too readily that he knows what he is going to build, pretty much down to the last detail; and then he goes and does it, without thinking or looking carefully while he is doing it. Concrete panels make adaptation all but impossible. Stud walls allow adaptation, but do not encourage the creation of living centers.
More generally, in order to produce the field of centers in simple, economical, and normal ways which can become everyday for millions of people in today’s society, I would argue, that it will require, primarily, process-based methods — methods which use high technology to give us processes, not components, and processes which can create sophisticated elements and members, fast and cheaply, yet fitting local circumstance and the eye of the person doing the work. Technology itself is perfectly capable of defining new techniques to help create a living field of centers: fast methods of cutting, shaping, pouring, forming. It is capable of using computer-controlled processes and processes where we investigate and create a far richer array of shapes than could be done in the first machine age.
Primitive technologies are unlikely to work for us because, so often, they just don’t work economically.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/16 Continuous invention of new materials and techniques#