1 Architecture as the continuation and completion of the land: how continuous unfolding of wholeness makes and remakes the earth

We have a vision, now, of buildings taking their form continuously through a smooth step-by-step process in which each step preserves the structure of what was there before.
In this visionary process the land — the Earth — gets differentiated continuously to develop and increase its harmony. We reach a view of architectural structure in which gradually, painstakingly, step by step, the world is created in a way that millions of people can take part in it and each small process adds one tiny bit of structure, deepens the structure.

In concrete detail, the process goes like this:

1. Everything comes from the whole.
2. It starts as a continuation of the land.
3. It embraces nature, and makes nature, and is nature.
4. Nature is not merely moss and rivers and trees: What we should properly call nature, is all that which follows from an unbroken sequence of unfolding, each unfolding from the wholeness that preceded it.
5. As such, of course nature can include buildings, and roads and bridges: together with rocks and soil and watercourses, in their multi-variegated geometry.
6. Within a building, the rectangles, the rectilinear order, also comes from a disciplined unfolding of the whole.
7. What seems like stark geometry, also arises from this unfolding.
8. The complex and curved forms of natural organisms arise naturally from the wholeness of a natural site.
9. The more austere forms of buildings, colonnades, rooms and windows, also arise from the wholeness that comes from buildings that are near rectangular, and that have to pack in near rectangular forms, to make positive space between them.
10. The totality, a complex of rectilinear and curvilinear, level upon level of scale, arises naturally, from unfolding and paying attention to the whole.
11. The adherence to the whole, is what we experience as feeling.
12. It is our birthright to surround ourselves with this natural world, to be skillful at doing it, to enjoy the benefits of living among the forms, which, in every detail, reflect our own longing, and also what we are.

Hand in hand with these events, the care of nature is structure-preserving, too. The world will then call for a new approach to ecology which goes beyond the conservation approach, in which is is understood that the environment can only be healthy when all of it, both “natural” and “man-made”, is understood as nature which is created. Like the great historical examples such as Southern England, Japan, or, in more recent times, huge areas in China, it allows us to anticipate a new “created” land, all over the surface of the earth, which has the characteristics of nature, preserves the aspects of nature which are profound, and yet integrates human beings, our buildings, our gardens, our roads, our walls, and our activities into nature, so that the man-made and the natural interpenetrate and support each other.
In this new balance four kinds of things will occur.
First, the natural is preserved in a new version of its wild state which is a managed and protected ecology. The land area given over to buildings and roads is concentrated so that it leaves a relatively large percentage of land in the more wild and natural state.
Second, the urban or developed part — the part containing most of the roads and buildings — is treated in a fashion which is more respectful of ecological and natural requirements. Roads are more modest, road surfaces are less aggressive, buildings and gardens are more interwoven.
Third, the landscape which extends out from houses and downtown building complexes, reaches out into the land immediately surrounding the buildings so that buildings, gardens and lanes are seen and experienced as one integrated structure.
Fourth, the natural wild land beyond the buildings is itself modified so that is does not exist in a state of pure original nature, but in a state which is also natural, a new, even improved nature in which ecological requirements, wild life, wild plants are cultivated in a balanced fashion. Even this last category of land — the largest — is man-made. This is not done in an effort to preserve a wilderness, but in an effort to create a new balanced state of existence in which nature is maintained, sustainable, and exists in balance with the human habitat that connects to it, exists near it, and interpenetrates it.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/Conclusion: The world created and transformed#