6 The hulls of public space for a community of families in Texas: unexpected centers in a piece of land

Merely defining this structure of land, water and trees, just identifying it and bringing it out in the open, allowed everyone to have a more excited, animated, substantial and feeling-filled relation to the activity of choosing, and placing their houses. Suddenly, instead of merely putting each house in a random arrangement of vegetation on arbitrarily divided pieces of land, the house could be placed in relation to an understood and meaningful public structure, which made sense, deeply, and which allowed the act of placing each house to make sense, too.
I taught them the basic principle of all architecture: To leave the structure which exists, to help that structure, to reinforce it — and how making even tiny changes too casually can be damaging. It was the wholeness of the land, which already existed there, that guided us.
The families spoke often about the way that they were moved by their awareness of this whole, that it corresponded to their intuitive knowledge, but that raising it to the level of a conscious principle was an enormous help to them. Apparently they became deeply moved by the desire to protect and extend and enlarge the wholeness of the land, and by the principle that every act must be done to increase the chance of doing this.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/3 The hulls of public space#