Life as an attribute of space and matter

Our job, as architects, builders, citizens, is to create this life in the air and stones and rooms and gardens — to create life in the fabric of space itself. This is not a merely a poetic way of talking. It is a new physical conception of how the world is made and how it must be understood, which — if it were accepted — would change, utterly, our conception of the world.

Although I have managed to show earlier that the recursive scheme in which life spawns life, life comes from life, still, the idea of life as an undefined primitive feature of matter/space, without further meaning that can be expressed, is very, very difficult to swallow or to understand. If it were not for the fact that so many practical matters about architecture become comprehensible within this frame of reference, I think one would not even have a reason to attempt it.

The appearance of life in space may be compared with some kind of awakening, almost as if — as it comes to life — space itself, the very matter, wakes up, awakens, and that it is this awakening of space in varying degrees — indeed in infinitely varying degrees — that we recognize when we see life in buildings, in the mountainside, in a work of art, in the smile upon a person’s face.

#book/The Nature of Order/1 The Phenomenon of Life/11 The awakening of space#