8 The true landscape of architecture

The true landscape of architecture is that arrangement of material which helps us arrive at this blissful state. It is generated by the free application of a living adaptive process.

The true landscape of architecture is the landscape of people nourished, satisfied, living a full life, being happy, a landscape that shows that happiness derived from the surroundings.

This condition of the world is far from the formal, over-geometric, stylized landscape of modernism and postmodernism — far, too, from the stylized landscape of classicism, ancient or modern, with its too-great emphasis on noble proportions and magnificence.
The true landscape of architecture is just that condition which gently supports, steers into existence, this subtle condition, and which is to be judged, entirely, on its actual performance, its actual ability to nourish us — its track record if you like — in helping us to be ourselves.

Here we see mud, sticks, roses, plates, and glasses, books that are being read (not laid empty and shut on coffee tables), glasses of wine half drunk, people standing, leaning, talking, being together, being apart, being quiet, and being raucous; even being touched and hurt by sadness, feeling the pain of existence. Even this pain is better than dead gloss. If the pain of existence is being felt, still it is real and give way, in its turn, to joy.

This — the unpredictable dynamic temporary state of life lived — is what we shall expect to see in a true landscape of architecture, and in a true language of architectural photographs.

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