Infinite variety, within deep underlying similarities that unify the whole.
Examples of what we mean by life and by good buildings are illustrated in many places on this site. All of them share, with nature, this character that every part, no matter how ordinary, and no matter how much it resembles other parts and other places, is magical, and can become an object of love for us. That happens because the uniqueness of every bush and every leaf, affirms and reaffirms, in every atom, and every cell, our underlying uniqueness.
In all traditional environments—boats, buildings, rooms, paintings, gardens, windows, roofs, materials, roof tiles—this underlying variation and sameness, combined as nature combines them—are re-affirmed. The elements are simple in appearance, but vary endlessless, and in varing as they do, like nature, they reaffirm the foundations of the human spirit.
When this is lost, as it has been lost in the 20th century—human beings are in peril, and depression, madness, anomie, despair, are not far away. They are caused, in essence, by the surroudnign image of a despairing circumstance, in which hotels, houses, apartments, offices, light fixtures, McDonalds hamburger places, , bricks, windows, panels, and modules, are identically repeated, and where, people too, are then thought to be ciphers of no importance that are identifically repaetd—and where, then, the soul of man is in great danger of being lost.
Our effort, on this website, is to regenerate, and generate for the first time, a living world in which the qualities of nature appear in every part of the built environment, and in which we make, therefore, for ourselves, a world which can be truly loved.
