- Real kindness is something quite different, something valuable in itself. It is a true process, not guided by the grasp for a goal, but guided by the minute to minute necessity of caring, dynamically, for the feelings and well-being of another. This is not trivial, but deep; sincerely related to human feeling; and not predictable in its end result, because the end result is not the goal. Unlike the goal-oriented picture, which is imposed intellectually on our substance as persons, real kindness is a process true to our essential human instinct and to our knowledge of what it means to be a person. But the machine-age view showed a process like kindness as being oriented toward a goal, just as every machine too has its purpose - its goal, what it is intended to produce.
- Not just goal oriented, but process oriented
- The wholeness is essentially preserved at each step, and the new structure is introduced in such a way that it maintains and extends - but almost never violates - the existing structure. It is globally structure-preserving. That is why the unfolding seems smooth
- All about process - not just what we do, but how we do it. 9/10 of the beauty is from the process itself
- Living process to be guided by feeling - adherence to the whole. If this were to be truly understood and followed, it would change nearly everything we know about modern society. This is a gargantuan shift, but humans and human nature are more in tune with feelings than with mathematics...The idea that feeling itself can become criterion and instrument - that what is done, no matter how large or how small, can become personal, connected to the personal self of all human beings - and that this process then opens the door to a new form of society. That is truly revolutionary. That can shake the world
- You might say that this is all just common sense. I believe you would be right. But this common sense flies in the face of many processes which 20th century architecture and construction practice set in place. When we try to make a building in such a way that it gets its life, what we have done here is the most natural way to do it: we get one thing right at a time. We do what we know. We get things right as we come to understand them. That gets good results. Expressed in the language of this book, it is a process of unfolding in which centers are established, modified, improved, one at a time
- This is a startling and new conception of ethics and aesthetics. It describes good structure as a structure which has unfolded "well," through these transformations without violating the structure that exists. The structure we know as living structure, is just that kind of structure which has unfolded smoothly and naturally, arising step by step from what exists, preserving the structure of what exists, and allowing the "new" to grow in the most natural ways as a development from the structure of "what is." This startling view provides us with a view of ethics and aesthetics that dignifies our respect for what exists and treasures that which grows from this respect. It views with disfavor only that which emerges arbitrarily, without respect for what exists, and provides a vision of the world as a horn of shimmering plenty in which the "new" 'grows unceasingly from the structure that exists around us already. That this horn of plenty is inexhaustible, and that we may conceive an everlasting fountain of novelty without ever having to beat ourselves over the head for the sake of novelty per se - that may perhaps be one of the greatest potential legacies of this new view of the world
- What is natural, of value, is that which unfolds naturally from the whole that exists
- Do one small, good thing, then another, and another...
- Growing bone adds material at the point where stress is greatest
- Paying attention to the wholeness = love of life
- By preserving structure, one always gets surprising results. The creative work is to illuminate, to reveal what is already there...but this takes depth of perception and love...certainly profound knowledge of the nature of space and its structure. To do it, successfully, we are called upon to make another crucial revision in our views about the nature of things: we have always assumed that the process of creation is a process which somehow inserts entirely new structure into the world...in the form of inventions, creations, and so on. Living process teaches us that wholeness is always formed by a special process in which new structure emerges directly out of existing structure, in a way which preserves the old structure, and therefore makes the new whole harmonious. Thus the process of making wholeness is not merely a process which forms centers or the field of centers in space...it is a process which gives special weight to the structure of things as they are. The enigma is that something new, unique, previously unseen - even innovative and astonishing - arises from the extent to which we are able to attend to what is there, and able to derive what is required from what is already there...and that all this, then, will lead to astonishing surprises. It is a process in which we most deeply express our reverence for what exists
- When we published The Pattern Language for the Peruvian houses, people in Peru said that our pattern language and our houses we designed from the pattern language were a more accurate reflection of Peruvian reality than even the Peruvian architects had managed...The essential technique in the observation of centers, in any social situation, and in any culture, is to allow the feelings to generate themselves inside you. You have to say, "What would I do if I were one of the people living here, what would it be like for me?" thus inserting yourself into the situation and then using your own common sense and feelings as a measuring instrument
What I got out of it
- Always be structure-preserving, seeking to naturally unfold what is already there, keeping wholeness and life. This process is what creates beauty, harmony, balance, life
