An act of creation is not just about making something new, something that never existed before. It’s also about the impact that the created object has on its surroundings.
Think about public sculpture that is placed on a highway median simply because the space is available and the city council believes that art will “class up” the city. The sculpture doesn’t improve the intersection. Often it simply looks like clutter, perhaps like a misplaced piece of equipment. If the sculpture wasn’t made for the space it won’t create a coherent whole.
While it may not be fair to compare public art in Anytown USA to Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio, he was forced with a similar situation. Pope Paul III wanted the stature of Marcus Aurelius moved to the center of the square, a move that Michelangelo felt weakened the structure of the square. Forced to deal with the sculpture, he reoriented the entire square, restoring wholeness to the entire site.
On a more modest scale, any act of building should also be an exercise in site repair.
>In this sense, the idea of repair is creative, dynamic, open. It assumes that we are constantly led to the creation of new wholes, by attention to the defects in the existing wholes, and trying to repair them. It is still true that every act helps to repair some larger, older whole: but the repair not only patches it – it also modifies it, transforms it, sets it on the road to becoming something else, entirely new.
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building 485 ff
This idea of repair, the creation of a new whole, creates a new center of life. It has the possibility of shifting the system dynamics entirely.
ALSO
If creation is an act of repair, we can also consider repair to be an act of creation, SEE Kintsugi, an Art that Goes Beyond Repair
