6 The archetype underlying all
I have tried to show how, common to all the examples of things generated by living process in that category, there are certain common features. I have called these features invariants of living process, the invariants of the fundamental process.
As we look at the examples, we may also see that these invariants themselves have certain common features from one to another and from category to category. In other words, the invariants of the underlying structure created at all the different scales themselves have something in common. Among all living structures, whether large or small, whether indoors or outdoors, whether space or solid, whether function or ornament, there is a deeper structural quality which appears again and again and again. There is a common thread, a deepest invariant, underlying all the invariants.
It is possible to characterize this deepest invariant of all like this:
Every time the fundamental process is used, no matter at what scale, we get a structure in which local symmetries are so densely packed that the highest possible density of local symmetries occurs, but without having an overall symmetry.
This deep structure arises for the following reason. Every time we have a local symmetry we get something: we get one strong center. Usually this local center plays some practical or functional role. Since there are many things to be accomplished in a living structure, and since there is not much “room” in three-dimensional space for all the different things which have to happen, these local symmetries have to be very densely concentrated, packed, so that the space can get as many centers as possible per cubic inch. But the larger conditions of almost any structure — at least in the general case — are asymmetrical. It is rare that a circumstance occurs where there is a pure spatial symmetry in the external conditions. Thus, to be well-adapted to the local conditions, the global structure must also be asymmetrical in the large — just like its conditions.
On the one hand, then, the resulting structure will be asymmetrical to fit the local conditions. On the other hand, it will contain as many local symmetries as possible, as densely packed as possible, so that within each part there are as many centers as possible, and so that the structure “does” as much as possible in a limited compass. And, in addition, for reasons fully expressed in Book 1, these centers and symmetries will be accompanied , necessarily, by the fifteen properties.
The archetypal forms, what we think of as the forms of human-based and traditional architecture, are drawn from a class of profound living structures which have the deepest symmetries and the most complex form. They are entirely unlike the designed forms of modernism, postmodernism and deconstructivism. The core of the class is an inexhaustible stock of building form which will appear, I believe, in the same root character, for as long as human beings will exist on earth, even in future time when profound materials and as-yet-unimaginable new technologies have been discovered. These forms belong to a deeper realm, and cannot be replaced.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/20 Summation: The morphology of living architecture#