3 Process and geometry: the origin of archetypal form

I have called these four books The Nature of Order. By this I mean to say that all living structure in the domain of buildings, as in other domains, will have a recognizable order, a certain way it looks.

If we want to make living structure in the world, we need to be able to characterize architectural geometry so that we can use the characterization to check our work constantly while we are working, to see if what we are doing measures up to the standard of living structure and has the kind of order it must have.
In the vision I have been trying to portray, the structure always originates from structure-preserving process, even when archetypal form is generated from a vision or a dream. Throughout Book 3, I have tried to show, by example, how every living process must necessarily go forward step-by-step, must be be an adaptive process which creates unity in the structure being made by adapting, shaping, pushing, pulling, gently easing the structure into harmony with the structure that exists.
I have also tried to show how a living process, by its nature, will always create something unique at every point. For each of the human beings in the world, the local environment crated by unfolding will be individual, particular — never mass-produced, never cheap psychologically, never too-simple in the alien mechanical sense, never mechanically bound to mass conceptions of the individual human being.

This process invites a wholesome relationship between people and the earth: not exploiting the earth for gain, or for the egocentric satisfaction of invention, but rather steadily bringing forth the new from the old, drawing an everlasting fountain of new creation from the structure of the present and of the past. It also creates wholes, wholes of remarkable and robust character. Perhaps most profound of all, the forms — the wholes which are created — are in themselves of a certain nature. There is something so profound, so solid, and so recognizable, about these wholes that it might almost be called a style. Yet it is not a style.

Originally, […] the word style was a word with a meaning not different from the idea of form language, as it is expressed in chapter 16 of Book 2, pages 432-39. In that usage, the word is neutral, and reflects the geometry and inward and outward geometry of a class of buildings. This is a useful meaning, because it focuses attention on the purely geometrical, and emphasizes the fact that we cannot get away from this purely geometric, morphological character of things. Indeed the concept must be referred to, just as I have had to refer to it, in order to capture the scientific, morphological meaning that I intend.
It is most unfortunate that the word “style” also carries a second meaning, the modern and postmodern meaning associated with such words as “stylish”, which reflect an arbitrariness, even a willfulness, that is entirely opposite from my intention. Nevertheless, since the word does capture the outward surface, what we see and experience when we first encounter a building, it is the only word which, in our modern era, can direct a reader’s attention to the configurational details and expressive power of the building — which is precisely what I do intend. Thus, the word cannot be avoided.

The living processes are remarkable, because they are at once very simple and yet also deep and surprising. Perhaps most surprising of all, these processes are based — necessarily — on deep feeling. This would have been commonplace to people of earlier times and of other cultures. But for us, living in an age largely bereft of reliance on deep feeling, it may come as a shock.

In addition, the living processes which follow combinations of the fundamental process will necessarily be generative processes — that is, processes in which the sequence of what is done follows a vital rhythm in which large precedes small, in which the whole creates the conditions for the part and shapes the parts according to their positions in the whole. This virtually rules out the oversimplified kind of mass production of components what was common in the 20th century. The uniqueness which is the most trenchant mark of life will occur and will be supported deeply, at every stage.

Finally — and here we come to the subject of this chapter — all living processes will be governed by the emergence of a special recognizable geometry, a style, an “architecture”. I hope this geometry has become at least partly recognizable in the examples I have shown. It is a geometry which shows feeling; it is a geometry which shows life. In the last six hundred pages, you may see that there is something common to the examples. In some fashion they all look alike. The style — if there is one — of the many varying examples in the last 600 pages is not an incidental quality which might be removed from them. This apparent “style”, this particular sort of geometry, is a particular kind of structure. It is that structure which follows directly from the use of living processes.

The dream of a universal style, mentioned often by architects of the early 20th century, can be found at last in the results of living process. It will not be found among the machine-age products of the world, not among the gigantic image-conscious buildings which resemble strangely made boxes and commercial advertisements, but among a quite new class of buildings, which in ultra-modern form, will very slightly resemble the most ancient buildings of the past — not in their outward style, but in their inward essence. They are new, and dramatic, and unknown. Yet they are part of the human archetype, and therefore known, even when they have not been seen before.

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