Centers help one another
How can we know that any two centers help each other?
Suppose we have two centers A and B, and we want to know if B is helping A or not. We simply look at A with B, and without B, and go back and forth between the two, using the criterion of life to decide which of the two, A with B or A without B, has more life. If, of the two, A with B has more life, then B is helping A.
Living structure explains both life and function
The concept of life or living structure — as something caused by the density of living centers in any given wholeness — explains life and function in a large variety of cases, cases so different that, under other forms of analysis we currently know, they would appear unrelated.
Living structure is enormously susceptible to minor changes, and accuracy of detail is necessary for success
Artists are aware, all too often, that a work can be made or broken by something that seems, to an outsider, a nearly trivial difference: a tiny spot of color, the shape of a curve. In buildings, too, the success of a room can depend on subtleties of placement where an inch this way or that makes all the difference, where a proportion changing by a few percent makes the difference between profound feeling and triviality. In natural living systems, too, a decimal point in a percentage of a chemical concentration can make the difference between life or death. In my experience this is not the exception, it is the rule.
Living structure comes to life only when the density of centers is present, and for it to be present, every center, at every scale (many of them large, but overlapping), must be shaped with the greatest care. It is this highly articulate and conscious structure, which must be — for an artist or an architect — the culmination of his art.
#book/The Nature of Order/1 The Phenomenon of Life/4 How life comes from wholeness#