Which one is our own personal picture of the world?... how can we find the common, and real, beauty in this personalized picture of the world?

The mistake and confusion in our picture of the art of building (or the real beauty) has come from our conception of what matter is.

What matter is, is governed by our idea of how space can be arranged; and that in turn is governed by our idea of how orderly arrangement in space creates matter.

When we understand what order is, I believe we shall better understand what matter is and then what the universe itself is.

WHAT IS: ...order?...that thing that we intuitively feel as order?... a living structure?... a living world?

WHAT MEANS LIFE?

In the 20th century scientific conception, what meant by life was defined chiefly by the life of an individual organism. We consider as an organism any carbon-oxygen-hidrogen-nitrogen system which is capable of reproducing itself, healing itself, and remaining stable for some particular lifetime.

We do feel  that there are different degree of life on things - and that this feeling is rather strongly shared by almost eveyone

It is undeniable that a breaking wave has more life as a system of water than an industrial pool stinking with chemicals

The peculiar yellow color of naturally occurring gold, so different from pyrites, or from the gold in the jeweller's shop, has an eerie magic essence that feels alive. This is not because for its monetary value. It got its monetary value originally because it had this profound feeling attached to it. [Marble from Carrara are famous because it feels intensely alive]

We experience life in the objects themselves and in their parts. And, in keeping with the idea of order, the life we experience seems very much to lie in the geometry, in the actual geometrical arrangement of the thing.

Some things feels alive because they are -as far as possible- concept-free.They are not based on images, or on ideas of realty, but instead they have reality itself coming to life in them in a free way

INTENSE LIFE IN ORDINARY POVERTY: Mental conceptions of what is desirable insipired by magazines, images of desire fostered by the media, here have gone out the window, or never existed. In the slum, in some way, the direct voice of the heart is there.

The task of making ordinary life in things: Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive.

The objects that feels alive remind us of the essence of life: They have a simplicity beyond artifice.

The beautiful chape of a window not only gives more life to the window, but also enlarges the window and the house

In a landscape most of the times, the degree of life has something to do with the dark and light

The Alexander theory about life: "What we call "life" is a general condition which exists, to some degree or other, in every part of space: brick, stone grass, river, paiting, bulding, daffodil, human being, forest city. And further: The key to this idea is that evey part of space - every connected region of space, small or large - has some degree of life, and  that this degree of life is well defined objectively existing and measurable"

The flower is not made from petals. The petals are made from their role and their position in the flower. This is an entirely different vision of reality from the one we have become used to.

I propose a view of physical reality which is dominated by the existence of this one particular structure, W, the wholeness. In any given region of space, some subregions, have higher intensity as centers, others have less. The overall configuration of the nested centers, together withe their relative instensities, comprise a single structure. I define this structure as "the " wholeness of that region.

The wholeness defined as the pattern of centers in some part of space, is not only the underlying causative structure in matters. Wholeness is a truly pervasive structure which acts at all scales.

The crux of the matter is this: a center is a kind of entity which can only be define in terms of other centers. The idea of a center cannot be defined in terms of any other primitive entities except centers.

Centers are always made of other centers. A center is not a point, not a perceived center of gravity. It is rather a field of organized force in an object or part of an object which makes that object or part exhibit centrality (Borges: un Aleph, un "punto que contiene todos los puntos",

Matise: He talks about the fact that the characterr of a human face is something which is deep in the person, deep in the face, and may not be captured by the local features. The character is something deeper than features: it is an inner thing which exists over and above the features and is not even dependent on these features.

Life comes directly from the wholeness: at each place in the world there is, at any instant, some given wholeness; that is, some definite, well-defined sstem of centers that creates the organization of that part of the world.

A piece of tissue, transplanted from a newt's eye if transplanted to the tail, becomes a tail. A piece of growing tail, transplanted to the eye, becomes an eye. It is the larger configuraton which determines the destiny of the growing material, not its local structure.