The Nature of Order, Volume 2: The Process of Creating Life

Claims (25)

• A center is needed at the head of the canyon, some intense building like a jewel, forming a two-center system with the canyon itself to strengthen the whole.
  Third and fourth steps in the canyon design dialog.
• A second change to the canyon would be to reveal the landform of the hills by trimming, so the whole shape becomes graspable as a living whole.
  Second global feature for Claremont Canyon.
• A structure-preserving transformation both preserves existing structure and enhances the whole by developing latent centers.
  Resolution of the apparent conflict between preserving and enhancing.
• A wide green swath flanking the road, forming a smooth green valley, would be a large boundary contributing to the vision of the whole.
  Sixth morphological ripple proposed for the canyon.
• Each step in a living process enhances the whole.
  Core thesis of the chapter: all action in a living process aims at increasing the beauty, life, and coherence of the whole.
• In a living design process, every step must be concerned with the whole and must make the feeling of the whole more profound.
  Restatement of the central principle in the context of the Claremont Canyon example.
• In the ship painting, the wholeness generated the details; details were created only to recreate the living wholeness and its light.
  Description of the author's painting process as a microcosm of a living process.
• Matisse's drawing actions are dominated by concern for the overall balance, coherence, and form of the whole, not by particular details.
  Observation used to illustrate the principle that great painters work from the whole.
• Morphological ripples are partially generated forms that set some global feature of the whole without yet fixing location, dimension, or character precisely.
  Definition of the concept of a morphological ripple.
• Moving with certainty means taking small steps, deciding only what you know, and rejecting guesses or large-scale trial-and-error.
  Core principle of stepwise decision-making.
• Sketches and computer drawings are over-specific and contain too much arbitrary information, hindering a genuine living process.
  Critique of graphic notation as a design medium.
• The best canvas for the evolution of form is the inner eye, the mind's eye, guided by a word picture.
  Advocacy for a fluid, non-graphic medium early in design.
• The evolution of St. Mark's Square over 1000 years was guided by people paying attention to the whole, specifically by iteratively identifying latent centers and building to intensify them.
  Historical interpretation of the square's emergence as a living process.
• The fifteen properties are attributes of wholeness and appear naturally when one focuses on enhancing the whole through structure-preserving transformations.
  Linking the fifteen properties to the process of seeking wholeness.
• The first few strokes in a design process carry within them the destiny of the rest.
  Highlights the crucial role of early, broad decisions.
• The first global change to Claremont Canyon should be making it reachable via a network of barely visible broad paths, giving a feeling of accessibility while remaining wild.
  First morphological ripple proposed for the canyon.
• The first possibilities that present themselves to the mind are more likely bad than good; therefore one should be extremely skeptical and reject most of them.
  Practical advice derived from the previous claim.
• The overall statistics of material (e.g., 50% open grassland, 50% tree cover) is one of the most important features of a whole.
  Fifth contribution about texture and statistical balance.
• The painting became realistic not by mechanical copying but because it was generated from the real life of the wholeness.
  Key claim about the source of realism in art.
• The process of design is an empirical matter: which step has the deepest feeling can be discovered by experiment in the real place or in simulations.
  Defines the experimental, empirical nature of deciding next steps.
• The ugliness of much contemporary building comes from builders no longer knowing how to make a building truly one with its surroundings.
  A diagnostic claim about the root cause of poor built environment.
• The word picture captures just what you have seen so far in your inner eye, adding little that is not generated by the living process.
  Explains why verbal description matches the mind's eye medium.
• There are more bad next steps than good ones in a design process; typically perhaps 90-95 out of 100 possible next steps make the thing worse.
  Quantitative intuition to justify radical skepticism toward early ideas.
• To be whole, a building must be 'lost' in its surroundings—not separate, but part and parcel of them.
  Defines the paradoxical quality of a living whole in architecture.
• Virtually all shocking blunders of modern and postmodern architecture turned out bad because they were unexamined experimentally—proposals were not compared by feeling to find the step with the deepest life.
  Historical/diagnostic claim linking bad architecture to failure of empirical comparison.