Prologue to Books 1-4

The Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe

The activity we call building creates the physical order of the world, constantly, unendingly, day after day. In the last five millennia, human beings have created millions upon millions of cubic yards of building, and millions of buildings, houses, roads, and cities -- entire worlds. Our world is dominated by the order we create. But although we are responsible for the creation of order on this enormous scale, we hardly even know what the word "order" means. Our present idea of "order" is obscure. Although the word is often used informally by artists and biologists and physicists -- usually to stand for some deep regularity we cannot quite define -- we need a better understanding of the deep geometric reality of order. If we are honest we must admit we hardly even know what kind of phenomenon it is. Yet we build the world, producing its order, day by day. Thus we go on, willy-nilly creating order in the world, without knowing what it is, why we are doing it, what its significance might be. In physics and biology some progress has been made toward understanding the phenomenon of order, and the processes which create order. The creation of living organisms through the morphogenetic process, the creation of matter, the creation of stars and galaxies from nuclear fire, the constant creation of particles by interaction with one another -- have all been studied in the last seventy years. In these limited cases we now have a rudimentary idea of the way the order-creation works. It has become clear, too, that the way the order is created in these cases is of essential importance to our understanding of the world. Our knowledge of order-creating processes in physics, chemistry, and biology has molded the modern view of the universe. The art of building has not, so far, had a comparable impact on our understanding of the world. Our modern picture of the universe, what kind of stuff space and matter is made of, has not been influenced by building or by architecture. Yet, I shall argue, the process of building is an order-creating process of no less importance than those of physics and biology. It is vast in its scale and scope. It is almost universal in our experience. It is therefore reasonable to think that the art of building might give us equally essential insights. In what follows I shall try to show that there is a way of understanding order which is general and does do justice to the nature of building and of architecture. It is a view which, I hope, is adequate to understanding the intuitions we have about beauty and the life of buildings. It is a view which tells us what it means for a building to be a great building, and when a building is working properly. It is, I believe, a common-sense and powerful view, with practical results. If you accept the view of order I am proposing, you will find it has unexpected intellectual

results. It modifies our view of the physical universe and the way the universe is put together. Thus, what starts out as a way of understanding architecture ends up, also, as a view which may affect our understanding of physics and biology. When we understand the art of building from this point of view of order, it not only changes our understanding of the building process, but also has the capacity to change our cosmology. I did not start out as a philosopher, and I have no special desire to write about philosophy or about the nature of things. This is not my trade. I am interested in one question above all -- how to make beautiful buildings. But I am interested only in real beauty. I was never interested in making the kinds of slick buildings which architects of my time have generally been making. They have, in many cases, given up the making of real beauty -- and have, by implication, even given it up as an attainable ideal. This is perhaps understandable. Making buildings at the level of beauty which was common in 12th- or 15th-century Europe and in hundreds of other cultures in almost all eras of human history except our own is very hard for us. It was especially hard for us, in the late 20th century, and will continue to be as we enter the 21st. For some reason -- not at first entirely clear to me thirtyfive years ago -- it is a matter of such difficulty for us that architects have almost given it up. But I have not been willing to do so. I never agreed to put up with second best, or to accept the almost silly idea of "good architecture" which certain 20th-century architects have foisted on the public. I wanted to be able to do the real thing -- and for that I had to know what the real thing is. The reason was not intellectual curiosity -- but only the practical reason that I wanted to be able to do it myself. Thinking about these matters has been extremely difficult. It has taken me thirty-five years to think my way out of the intellectual thicket where I started. And I believe this intellectual confusion is shared today by almost every architect. I am at heart a very empirical person. I try to think carefully about things, and I want them to make sense. Again and again I found that there are issues in the making of buildings where our modern mentality -- our way of looking at the world -- makes it hard, or impossible, to come to grips with the facts as they really are. Issues which were straightforward in other ages -- such as spirit, for example, or the life that can exist in stone -- are inadmissible for us. I found it almost unbearably difficult to accept some of the theoretical concepts I was led to in the course of my work on these topics. Yet the problems we must face if we are to make things beautiful kept me coming, again and again, to fundamental questions about the nature of matter, and about the nature of the empiricist tradition -- especially the tradition which we ascribe to René Descartes. As a scientist trained in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, I found that I was sometimes formulating concepts which were hard to believe. Sometimes I felt I was betraying my training. The new principles I discovered seemed questionable. It was, in many cases, even embarrassing to formulate them, very hard to allow myself to think these thoughts. I stood looking always at my empiricist tradition, and at the tradition of thought which I learned at Cambridge, and felt ashamed sometimes to be saying such things. But the facts I encountered were stronger than my squeamishness. I found that I was able to construct a coherent view of order, one which deals honestly with the nature of beauty, but only by formulating new and surprising concepts about the nature of space and matter. In the end, it was my respect for empirical truth that made me give up my doubts, and gave me the strength to formulate conceptions which are -- for an empiricist of 20th-century training -- suspicious or potentially ridiculous. Even now, on some days I look at the theory I have formulated in these four books and can hardly believe that it is true. It provides a view of the universe which is so surprising, and so much at odds with the normal common-sense ways of thinking about physical reality we have currently, that it seems almost like a fantasy, like

some kind of science fiction. But then, on other days, I go through the arguments again and realize that no matter how strange these ideas are, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that they must be true. There seems to be no alternative way of putting things together -- at least not one that I have been able to discover -- in which we get a proper view of the things that are important. Skeptical readers will share my doubt about the intellectual formulations I have presented. Some of the formulations will seem very hard indeed to swallow. But for that very reason, and since it is above all the skeptical reader whom I would like to persuade, I express my own doubt about what I have done, and confess to a squeamishness which must be at least as great, perhaps even greater, than that of the most skeptical reader. Yet in the end I do believe that what I have written here is true. As a child I was always impressed by Saint Teresa. She was a 16th-century Spanish Carmelite nun who -- so history tells us -- was made a saint not because she believed so intensely in God, but because of her doubt. Most of the time she did not believe in God. Only now and then she did believe. But she never gave up her struggle and her doubt. She struggled with her faith, and, in the midst of her doubt and disbelief, found occasionally for a few moments that indeed she did believe. For this she was canonized. I have always identified with Saint Teresa. Her confusion and her honesty seem very typical of our own age. Much of the time I find myself wondering if the theory I have presented in this book can really be true, or if I have merely concocted some fantastic fiction. But occasionally, in a few lucid moments, I see clearly, and it seems to me that it must be true, simply because there is no other explanation which is equally convincing and covers all the facts. Then in another instant I am doubting again, because it is just too difficult for a hard-boiled empiricist like me to believe that the metaphysical part, especially, of what I have written, and my analysis of the nature of space and matter, really can be true. A few years ago, I was asked to go to the premiere of a film which had been made about my work. I was reluctant to go. It was a weekend, and I wanted to be with my family. In the end, though, we all decided to go together, Pamela and Lily and Sophie and I. The film was being shown at a film festival in San Francisco, at an old movie-house in the Mission district. We went in, they were showing all kinds of art films and new films one after the other, mainly fairly short ones. We sat through several of these films. Then mine came along, half an hour long. When the lights went up, I stood up. I had been asked to come forward and answer some questions. To my surprise people started cheering. I was astonished. Of course touched, very moved. But to be honest I couldn't quite understand the reason for it. Of course I liked it. But anyway, it still seemed inexplicable. I walked up to the stage, and people kept cheering and clapping. When I got there, the lights were very bright. They began asking questions, I gave not very good answers, the lights were so bright. We went along for a few minutes like that. Then someone asked me, How did you come up with the pattern language? How did you get the actual material? I said, "Well, it was not so very different from any other kind of science. My colleagues and I made observations, looked to see what worked, studied it, tried to distill out the essentials, and wrote them down." "But," I went on, "we did do one thing differently. We assumed from the beginning that everything was based on the real nature of human feeling and -- this is the unusual part -- that human feeling is mostly the same, mostly the same from person to person, mostly the same in every person. Of course there is that part of human feeling where we are all different. Each of us has our idiosyncrasies, our unique individual human character. That is the part people most often concentrate on when they are talking about feelings, and comparing feelings. But that idiosyn-

cratic part is really only about ten percent of the feelings which we feel. Ninety percent of our feelings is stuff in which we are all the same and we feel the same things. So, from the very beginning, when we made the pattern language, we concentrated on that fact, and concentrated on that part of human experience and feeling where our feeling is all the same. That is what the pattern language is -- a record of that stuff in us, which belongs to the ninety percent of our feeling, where our feelings are all the same." When I said this, a sort of cry went up, people shouted and clapped again, stood up and cheered. Then dimly I began to understand why they had been clapping when I first came forward. What they saw in me was a voice saying that our shared human feeling has been forgotten, hidden in the mess of opinion and personal differences. What people find, and what moves them, in all the work which my colleagues and I have been doing for so many years, is that we have tried to honor and respect the reality of this huge ocean -- this ninety percent of our self -- in which our feelings are all alike. The fact that this huge basis, this huge ocean, has been forgotten -- and has, perhaps, in my own works been reawakened -- that is what brought them there that day to see that film, that is what made them stand up and shout. This book, at root, is about the core of that ninety percent of our feeling which we all share. It is about a more realistic conception of the world and of the universe which comes into existence -- and can come into existence -- only when we acknowledge that to a very large degree we are all the same.

I should perhaps say a brief word about my claim that these four books are "an essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe." In the course of explaining my views on architecture, and what it takes to make a coherent architecture, I have proposed models that include two features which would be large enough to justify the claim that these books are about the nature of the universe. One of these is the claim that all space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it, and that matter/space is more alive or less alive according to its structure and arrangement. This claim is discussed in the present volume, Book 1, THE PHENOMENON OF LIFE. The other is the claim that all matter/space has some degree of "self" in it, and that this self, or anyway some aspect of the personal, is something which infuses all matter/space, and everything we know as matter but now think to be mechanical. This claim is discussed in Book 4, THE LUMINOUS GROUND. If either of these claims comes, in future, to be considered true, that would radically change our picture of the universe. Indeed, one might then say that the universe as we have known it for the last four hundred years, even in the exciting and fascinating versions of physics and cosmology which have come under discussion in recent decades, would then have to be replaced by a fundamentally different and more personal view of matter.