The significance of generated structure
It is the mistake-ridden character of the plans which marks them as fabricated — and that comes from the way they are actually generated, or made, in time. Generated plans have few mistakes.
What is a mistake in a piece of software (code)?
In a mechanical scheme like E, each line has roughly five mistakes associated with it. By that I mean that the line was drawn on a drawing board, without any opportunity for the line to be modified, or adjusted, according to realistic perception of actual difficulties and opportunities on the place itself. I claim that in a professional planning/design/development process, this failure of adaptation is inevitable, and that at the time of its creation no process was put in place to remove these mistakes.
By contrast, in C, I argue that each line represents a decision that was put down, one at a time, over a history extended in time, and that each decision was made by people associated with the place, the house, the immediate conditions. As a result of this relatively slower unfolding process, and as a result of the decentralization of the decision-process in different people’s hands and in the hands of people intimately associated with the needs of the situation, I shall say, further, that at the time the line is put down, each of the five possible mistakes (that existed in E) is here corrected, by adaptation, and that as a result of the process which allows each line to be considered carefully, and adjusted, these five possible mistakes are eliminated.
Any process which statically determines these elements (lines, edges, and positions) merely by drawing-board planning, cannot avoid having some 8,000 mistakes.
C, on the other hand, has very few mistakes in it — or perhaps, by the same kind of count, at most a few hundred. Thus, the effect of allowing C to grow in time, and to grow gradually, to unfold gradually, is that most of the possible mistakes in it are eliminated, while a designed and planned object such as D will have on the order of 10^4 mistakes in the site plan alone.
That is the enormous difference between a generated thing, and a designed and fabricated thing. In a fabricated/designed thing, it is virtually certain that it will have a huge number of mistakes, reducing the value of the environment, and reducing its ability to support people’s daily lives in an efficient and adequate fashion.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/6 Generated structure#