worldsystemA

book 2 the process of creating life was waiting for me when i got home today

i decided i'd do nothing else until i had read the book but this has not been possible as its pretty dense and i can only take in so much at a time

i also need to review the fifteen properties of life

levels of scale
strong centers
boundaries
alternating repetition
positive space
good shape
local symmetries
deep interlock and ambiguity
contrast
gradients
roughness
echoes
the void
simplicity and inner calm
non separateness

"In a living system what is to be always grows out of what is, supports it, extends its structure smoothly and continuously, elaborates new form - but without ever violating the structure which exists.

When this rule is violated, as it was, far too often, in 20th-century development, chaos emerges. A kind of cancer occurs. Harm is done. All in all modern society succeeded, in the last century, in creating an ethos where buildings, plans, objects ... are judged only by themselves, and not by the extent to which they enhance and support the world. This means that nature has been damaged, because it is ignored and trampled upon. It means than ancient parts of towns and cities have been trampled, because the modernist view saw no need to respect them, to protect them.

But even more fundamental, it came about because the idea of creativity which became the norm assumed that it is creative to make things that are unrelated (sometimes disoriented and disconnected just in order to be new), and that this is valuable - where in fact it is merely stupid, and represents a misunderstanding, a deep misapprehension of how things are. Creativity comes about when we discover the new within a structure already latent in the present. It is our respect for what is that leads us to the most beautiful discoveries. In art as in architecture, our most intelligent and most wonderful creations come about, when we draw them out as extensions and enhancements of what exists already.

The denial of this point of view, is the chief way in which 20th-century development destroyed the surface of the earth." p136

and

"Living structure in buildings can only be GENERATED. It cannot be created by brute force from designs. It can only come from a generative process existing in the production process of society - so that the building - its conception, plan, design, detailed layout, structural design, and material detail are all unfolded step by step in TIME." p176

and

"The proper unfolding of wholeness is both an unfolding of space from the culture which exists, and an unfolding of a new (future) culture from the culture of the present."