5 The feeling-symmetry principle within these examples
Each of the four examples has a carefully worked geometry which creates a profound and subtle form of ease. And precisely that, too, is the morphological character of living structure — it is always the simplest thing it can be. It is that which creates the ease.
It worked in each of these examples, because in each case I asked the questions in the right order. I got one symmetry after another from the emerging thing, from the building form itself as it was evolving. Each time the newly added symmetry made the feeling deeper.
Yet what I did in adding local centers and symmetries did not conform to a preconceived plan. I only asked questions about centers and symmetries, and so unfolded the form. What that means is that I made these symmetries appear in the right order to extend the wholeness which was visible at any given moment in the unfolding process — and what that meant, effectively, was choosing the ones which generated the most feeling. As a result the form which was created had the simplest and deepest feeling — and thus took on, one might almost say, the form of human life itself made manifest — the character of human experience and humanness made visible. This did not come from an idiosyncratic style. It came only from an attempt to do the simplest thing that could create true feeling.
What the four examples cited just now have in common is their simplicity. Each of the examples has the minimal structure for its situation that carries weight of feeling. It has some sweetness. It is not costly. It is not complicated. It is simple. Sometimes it is crude. But in each of the examples I have given, it was calculated by experiment to be as intense as possible in its feeling (both in its sweetness and in its bitterness). That was established, in each case, experimentally. And from that the building or made thing got its form. That is how the symmetries were judged.
It is this process which generates the class of living structures. It is this which generates the living, growling, archetype. It is this, when carried out fully, that leads to the emergence of the archetype which lies at the core of living form.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/20 Summation: The morphology of living architecture#