9 Emergence of building volumes in a more repetitive project

When combinations of the fundamental process are used to place and shape building volumes, the land always ends with a certain sort of pattern: a combination of nearly rectangular volumes, not quite rectilinear in their placing, placed rather in relation to contours, flat places, slight lines of slope, positions of other buildings. Some of the volumes typically end up with roofs that create strong centers; the buildings surround and form courts and terraces and gardens as important as the building volumes, circulation realms, trees and pockets in the land honored by space, steps and terraces.
Subject to these influences, the rectangles are hardly ever perfectly rectangular. Even the building volumes typically have odd excrescences sticking out from them added on, and, occasional departures from the perfect 90 degrees in their corners, all done so that the syncopated and more subtle structure can accommodate the fitness to the contour, to the positive space of neighborhood buildings, to the accidents of a rock, or of a great tree, or of a bridge.
All this follows from the creation of positive centers, under the impact of the fundamental process. The pattern which results, though contemporary and of our time, will also, necessarily, resemble an ancient and universal one.

Once our obsession with structure-destroying modernity has subsided, and we have stopped blindly destroying valuable structure in cities and landscapes, we may, in a far-distant future, be able to create similar patterns in a new form, again and again, all over the Earth. And the Earth, with such building volumes on it, may then perpetually seem fresh and young.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/5 The positive pattern of space and volume in three dimensions on the land#