11 Geometrical consequences: structural effects of living process in the realm of belonging

All living process does two things. It pays attention to the centers which exist, and creates new centers which enhance them and embellish them.
As a result, it respects the uniqueness of every place, and works to make new structures — roads, houses, offices, gardens, rooms — which are adapted to the particularity of the place. That kind of adaptation makes them lovable, and possible to love; and when we love them, we belong there.
At the same time, any living process, in its nature, also respects us, the users, the persons who live there, or work there, or care for that place. This second kind of adaptation generates a uniqueness which is particular to the people there, and once again establishes the relation of belonging.

End-user programming has a similar vision. If you democratize programming, people can crate their own environment again, adapted to their specific needs.

But living process, insofar as it affects belonging, also works because it generates a very particular kind of morphological structure, a graininess, a quality that is far, far removed from the shiny image-driven slickness of contemporary architecture and design.
The places which have this belonging have a rubbed-in, used, quality. The quality is rough and ready, not pristine. It cannot afford to be perfect, because life, too, is rough and ready. The Japanese call it “wabi-to-sabi”, or rusty beauty. In so far as it is beautiful, it is imperfect too.

It is this quality which is hardest to accomplish in the formal image-ridden framework we call architecture today, this which is most elusive, and which has been most violently trampled, even eradicated, by the present process we call architecture and design and construction. Yet for human life to be fulfilling it is, in the end, this quality which most desperately needs to be accommodated and created. No building has this quality — exactly — at the time when it is built. But some buildings, some landscapes — invite it, encourage it, foster it.

Living process which succeeds in making belonging always leads to fine grain, to the fact that the environment is small-textured, and that the local symmetries are in a full hierarchy, and that the material and texture allow small local symmetries to unfold and expand further, according to need.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/2 Our belonging to the world#