Chapter 20: The Spread Of Living Processes

Ten things worth taking away

1. Living process necessarily produces a recognizable geometry — not style as arbitrary choice, but form that follows directly from the use of living processes.
2. The deepest invariant across all scales: densely packed local symmetries with no overall symmetry — maximum centers per cubic inch, globally asymmetrical to fit conditions.
3. Every local center is created by introducing a local symmetry; the question is always which new symmetry most intensifies the feeling of the emerging whole.
4. The green doll example: a few cuts, each the simplest symmetry needed, nothing more — rudimentary yet carrying the intensity of a real thing.
5. San Jose shelter: a homeless man said everything in the building was 'exactly what is required and nothing else' — this precision made him feel grounded and able to become whole.
6. The weak archetype covers all living structure, all traditional building; the strong archetype is narrower, rarer, more awe-filled — striking fear yet creating peace.
7. Strong archetype requires more than fundamental process: it needs living process combined with a conscious, half-conscious search for the origin of all things.
8. The fifteen properties (levels of scale, strong centers, boundaries, alternating repetition, positive space, good shape, local symmetries, deep interlock, contrast, gradients, roughness, echoes, the void, simplicity, not-separateness) accompany every living structure necessarily.
9. 'Savage' — not ferocious but wild, untamed, original, direct, unweakened by sophisticated thought — is the quality that emerges when fundamental process is most purely used.
10. Truly living architecture will look ordinary, indistinguishable from nature, requiring painstaking attention to the ordinary, and will hardly look like architecture at all.

Key passages