4 The seeming miracle: why beauty of space and mass generates good engineering structure
What is most remarkable of all, is that the structure which is created by a feeling for centers and by a conscious and deliberate aim towards the feeling of the whole, will often turn out to be an efficient structure.
If we make a pattern of members which has life according to the geometric centers formed in the space, then just embellishing the system of centers according to its own pattern will turn it into something which is efficient and good from a structural point of view.
Apparently good engineering structure follows, directly or indirectly, from the use of living process. The deep nature of space appears to be so profound that just the geometric unfolding, when it is done properly, leads to results which make sense from an engineering point of view.
This is most surprising. A process which places focus on the space, on positive space, positive rhythms of elements, positive shape of members, positive shaping of gaps and spaces and volumes of thin air between the members — all that, governed by what seems like an almost abstract artistic process — does tend to create structures which work as engineering structure. They are efficient, stable, well-behaved, coherent in their deformations. Why this happens is a deep matter, too difficult to analyze here. Mathematically, it is still a mystery.
I believe it occurs for the reasons that I have touched on in Book 1, chapter 11. There I suggested that function follows from well-ordered space, apparently because the forces we think of as functional are themselves geometric and themselves space-like. That, roughly speaking, is what we also find with engineering. When the process followed in unfolding an engineering structure is a version of the fundamental process, and we use it to create coherent space, the nice behavior and the good engineering qualities of the resulting structure follow naturally. And occasionally this process leads to a structure which has never been invented before, to a structure that is innovative even to an engineer.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/6 Positive space in engineering structure and geometry#