1 Emergence of an archetypal core

In a building which has life, whatever is made is always the simplest thing consistent with its necessities of feeling and with the close and continuous attention to feeling while it evolves into form. This, I think, is the closest I can come to describing the core of architecture.

When everything is going right, when the fundamental process is used well, what comes out is not only neutral, not only simple, not only living structure. It has, too, an archetypal quality — something savage.

Throughout, I have tried to show how such life can come about, naturally, by unfolding from the fundamental process. But what I also know is that works of building come closest to something truly valuable, when they reach this savage core. It is this savage core which will arise naturally from unfolding and from the fundamental process, when they are most purely used.

It is as if, when something is successful, it reaches the the same deep underlying form again and again; it is always one form, that one form which can take a thousand faces. One learns it, in the end, by feeling it, and by example.

It is always the same substance. Technology changes continuously as society changes. Through the changing technology, the eternal forms are continually refreshed and given new character, new implementation. That is the temporally changing part we know as style. But the core, the unchanging core, is the expression of ancient and eternal truths of unity.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/20 Summation: The morphology of living architecture#