The fact is, that even when we have seen deep into the processes by which it is possible to make a building or a town alive, in the end, it turns out that this knowledge only brings us back to that part of ourselves which is forgotten.
Although the process is precise, and can be defined in exact scientific terms, finally it becomes valuable, not so much because it shows us things which we don’t know, but instead, because it shows us what we know already, only daren’t admit because it seems so childish, and so primitive. […]
This is why it is so easy for others to play on our fears. They can persuade us that we must have more method, and more system, because we are afraid of our own chaos. Without method and more method, we are afraid the chaos which is in us will reveal itself. And yet these methods only make things worse.
The thoughts and fears which feed these methods are illusions.
It is the fears which these illusions have created in us, that make places which are dead and lifeless and artificial. And—greatest irony of all—it is the very methods we invent to free us from our fears which are themselves the chains whose grip on us creates our difficulties.
For the fact is, that this seeming chaos which is in us is a rich, rolling, swelling, dying, lilting, singing, laughing, shouting, crying, sleeping order. If we will only let this order guide our acts of building, the buildings that we make, the towns we help to make, will be the forests and the meadows of the human heart.