Conclusion

The scheme of things I have started to present covers all of architecture. The scheme starts with the concept of wholeness as something which exists in space, and with the idea of centers, the way that centers help each other. It goes on to the idea of living structure -- the detailed ideas about the fifteen properties that allow centers to help each other, and the observation that this structure is pervasive in nature and in deeply satisfying man-made things.

This constitutes, I think, a complete and coherent intellectual platform on which it is possible to erect a sensible architecture. We have suffered, in the last hundred years especially, because the old roots of architecture -- its sound pre-intellectual traditions -- have largely disappeared, and because the lawless, arbitrary efforts to define a new architecture -- a modern architecture -- have been, so far, almost entirely without a coherent basis.

I am proposing a new basis, a platform which gives architecture new content and meaning. The most important thing about this platform I have presented is that it is based on what most people experience as frue or real -- it is rooted in observation. This empirical and factual nature makes it possible, in principle, for us to achieve agreement.

The confusion of the last hundred years in architecture has arisen, largely, because of the lack of a coherent basis which is rooted in common sense, in observation, and which is congruent with human feeling. The confusion has existed mainly because of disagreements about what should be done, what is worthwhile, what is it that we should aim for. These disagreements have not, on the whole, been pursued by experiment, or logical reasoning. The positions -- modernism, postmodernism, organic architecture, the architecture of the poor, architecture of high technology, critical region alism -- the different positions -- have been discussed much as one might discuss the latest clothing fashions. The absence of reasoned discourse has created, in the world, an architecture ruled by money and power and images.

All this has come about because, in the intellectual atmosphere of pluralism, celebrated in the 20th century, it has been easy to say what one believes, but nearly impossible to say what is good or true. Indeed, avoiding, at all costs, serious discussion of what is good has been the reason for the crumbling failure of the past century's architecture.

But it is exactly that question which cannot be avoided. A criterion for judgment is the core -- the necessary core -- of any architecture. A core of judgment cannot be created by shouting that one is right. Instead, a core of judgment must be found which appeals to the deepest instincts in everyone, so that we can say to ourselves, Yes, this is indeed the basis from which we ought to proceed, and therefore the basis from which we must proceed.

Obviously, I cannot prove by mere assertion that what I have written here constitutes such a basis. If the nature of living structure is to become the basis on which people approach architecture in the future, that will only be -- can only be -- because we recognize, by ourselves, and in our own terms, that it is a sensible way to go forward, and that it is congruent with our deepest sensations of art, and beauty, and justice, which affect the structure of buildings and towns.

My argument is simply this: the existence of wholeness is something real in the world, whether we choose to see it or pay attention to it, or not. It is a mathematical structure which exists in space. I believe that a holistic view of space -- which shows how structure appears in space as a whole, as a result of local symmetries and centers -- follows from careful observation of what exists.

I believe that what we call life in architecture and the built environment springs from this wholeness. Because space is of such a nature that symmetries and centers can arise in it, it follows that centers can help each other to become more and more alive. And it follows from that, that progressively more and more profound structures can exist in space. These are the structures we recognize in the great heritage of human art. It is highly significant that the same structures and the same structural scheme arise in nature. The structures we observe in nature also arise from the wholeness, and their life, too, comes from the root cooperation of centers, providing the foundation for the architecture I propose.

By illustrating the existence of living structure, I have shown, I hope, that the phenomenon of life is something greater, more profound, and more general, than what we have come to think of, and accept, as biological life.

In contemporary science, biological life has come more and more vividly into the intellectual picture. We have an emerging picture of biological and ecological systems as self-sustaining and self-creating networks. This picture is dynamic, promising, and marvelous. Yet it is still solidly mechanistic in nature.

I believe that I have shown that this picture is simply not deep enough to be true. Fueled by questions which arise in art and architecture, and inspired above all by the yearning to create great buildings, better buildings, buildings which have life in them, I have tried to draw attention to the idea that life, as a phenomenon, occurs not only in living organisms and ecological networks. It is something, a quality and a structure, which occurs in all kinds of places and systems in the world, both inorganic and organic.

Thave tried to suggest -- to prove -- that life is a phenomenon which is more profound than a self-reproducing machine, that it attaches to the very substance of space itself. As such, it is capable of laying a foundation for all of architecture, for the construction of a living world.

This foundation is more general than the one provided by contemporary biology, because it suggests that even in static structures, in stones, in rooms, in water, in sand, even in color, life can occur, life does occur, and that this life, which occurs in speechless stones and concrete, is something that goes to the very root of human existence.

I have suggested that living structure lies at the core of all life. This living structure is in the very mathematics of space. It is a discernible, countable, and measurable quality, which arises -- for structural reasons that concern only the appearance of centers, all of them differentiated structures -- in space itself.

The living structure I have described is highly specific and real. Whether or not it is present in a particular part of space, and to what extent it is present there, are questions of fact. We are assured, nearly, that when this living structure is present in a particular part of the world, we react to it; it makes us feel alive merely to see this living structure or to be near it. It is, at least to an approximation, the key to good architecture -- something that was held for so long to be a matter of intuition, beyond analysis. But it is definable, and it is accessible to analysis.

The future of architecture can be changed, fundamentally, by an appreciation of living structure. If we choose, consciously and intentionally, to create this kind of living structure in the streets and buildings of our world, we have a good chance of being able to create a true living world, something of the same depth that traditional builders and craftsmen were able to accomplish.

As I have suggested in chapter 10, there is reason to think that the existence of this living structure -- wrapped in culture, based on culture, and mixed with culture, to be sure -- is the substrate which provides us with our freedom, with the ability to be free in ourselves. Thus living structure has vital practical and social consequences. We may say that, for the sake of our own welfare, the world must be made so that it contains, and is built from, living structure.

In Books 2 and 3, I shall discuss the ways in which living structure can be created. We need to learn how living structure is to be created and sustained. It is not easy. And there are only certain restricted methods, or processes, which typically create living structure.

To have a practical theory of architecture which can create living structure in the world, we shall find a need for processes which hark back to ancient prototypes of process, and which yet point to the far distant future -- a future possibly remote from our present abilities and sensibilities -- and to an age when the creation of living structure may be understood by all of us as the most fundamental task of human beings.

The living structure is something which closely resembles ancient and primitive forms. It is not modern, it is not classical. It is derived, as it were, from the deepest and most ancient archetypes. Yet like the Golden Gate Bridge in its time, it also resides in the most modern technology. Substance is to be formed from the material of space in such a way that in it, we recognize our own souls. And this stuff, its matter, its organization, is to provide the stylistic, and practical, basis for a new architecture.

The living structure contains everything of importance about a building. Above all, it contains the functions of the building. The building which works best, I maintain, will be the one which has living structure to the greatest degree.

Further, and perhaps most surprising of all, this living structure is somehow connected to, wrapped up in, our own selves. The deepest living structure is that which reflects the deep self of all of us, and of each of us as individuals, most profoundly.

This is a new way of looking at architecture. The intellectual foundation of this vision is the idea that space itself, matter itself, has life in varying degrees. There is a convergence of function, geometry, and feeling in space; this space is conceived as a living fabric that -- through its structure -- encompasses these things. Space does not merely contain living structure. Space has life, to a greater or lesser degree. It is the space itself which resembles self, which functions, which works, which has living structure in it, and which has life. The life which appears is an attribute of space itself.

The architecture which follows in Books 2, 3, and 4 is based on a conception of the world in which the air we breathe, the stones and concrete our city streets are made of, all have life in them, or not; all have life, anyway, in varying degrees. 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 merely a poetic way of talking. It is a new physical conception of how the world is made and how it must be understood.