The five-thousand possible mistakes in a typical house
It is fair to say that if any one of these decisions is made blindly, according to design information in a construction blueprint, it is virtually certain that this decision will be a mistake since there is — in general — no way that luck could manage to make the decision come out right. The mistake will be avoided, and the “right” thing done, only if the decision has attention, thought, and mental effort.
It must be said empathically that this by no means requires an increase in construction cost. The valuable decision time need not be done by a highly paid worker — it can be done by family members themselves, provided what they decide can then be built without extra effort or material cost, and the only thing the construction worker or craftsman must do then is to cut, nail, and place material correctly, according to the wishes of the client.
This does of course require new forms of contract which provide new relationships between client, craft, and labor, and new forms of cost control which can achieve these things in a practical legal framework.
The concept of mistakes does not only apply to what is functional in the obvious way. A mistake, is ultimately a geometrical problem, which bears on what we call function, and the concept of practical function is only the tip of the iceberg. […] So, in a small object which appears in the house, within its structure, even within an inch or two, there are also mistakes possible, or harmonies achievable.
If you want to get a system of centers to appear in that cup or glass, you must introduce them in a certain order, the placing of each depending on infinitesimal subtleties in the structure and geometry, as they have appeared up to that moment. This is what the loose term “unfolding” means.
And further, you can only get this structure by allowing the profound and multiple structure of centers to appear in a certain order, so that you get each bit of the structure by unfolding it — from the previous state. Thus the importance of time, is not merely that you have a chance of tinkering and adapting. It also allows you to get each next layer of structure from the previously established layers of structure. Complex, generated structure cannot be arrived at in any other way.
One structure is established. The next structure is then made to appear within that structure, and from that structure. Each stage develops from the previous stage, each one creating the conditions from which the next can be created, and from which it flows.
It is in this process that the fifteen properties, and their enormous density, can be achieved. That is the secret of the whole thing.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/6 Generated structure#