In individual buildings, too, we may ask what is the nature of a “mistake”?

Whether the mistakes are successfully avoided, depends on the adequacy and subtlety, of the generating process. In particular, it is essential — absolutely essential — that the adaptation, and the avoiding of mistakes, occurs at several levels of scale, as I described earlier.
If this does work, then the adaptation is capable of real, subtle fine tuning. If the adaptation occurs only at one level — what I might call, well-meaning tinkering — this will not work out very well.

Each of these things, once again, depends on adjustment, attention to position, dimension, comfort, and adequacy. If missing, they are mistakes of adaptation — adaptations that were not achieved.

The point, of course, is not that the porch is ancient or archaic, but simply that it is better. It has the deeper adaptation, to its use, to its surroundings, and to its internal organization — and is therefore better.
Above all the blue porch avoids the two-thousand mistakes which are potentially present in such a porch, and for this very concrete reason is a better, more deeply adapted structure. The battle cry of modern architects, throughout much of the 20th century, which branded such things as nostalgic, irrelevant, not modern, and so forth, was really little more than a wild attempt to justify the huge mistakes modern buildings (and developers and architects) were making daily, by claiming that things which did not make these mistakes were “bad” and “nostalgic”.
In fact, of course, the number of mistakes or its contrary — depth of adaptation — has nothing to do with style.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/6 Generated structure#