A radical new process

The role of drawings was also very different from that in the normal professional process of today. Since the construction was indeed an unfolding process, we could not know how the house would turn out in detail, until it was finished. Although some drawings were made during the process — for permits, structural checking, and so on — all the participants knew that the drawings were merely a rough approximation of what was to become the finished building.

The house was carefully built to a fixed budget — according to contract — and came in on budget. […] This contract allows construction price to be guaranteed while unfolding is taking place, even though the design is not rigidly fixed ahead of time. Thus the client does not have the financial uncertainty that such an open-ended project would create in a typical late 20th-century construction contract where many steps of the unfolding would be viewed as changes.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/Appendix#