At each step decide only what you know with certainty

As the living process goes forward, repeating the fundamental process again and again, and applying the fifteen transformations as needed, one feature is built up at a time. When we are sure of the first, we add a second. When we are sure of the first and second, we add a third.
How do you determine these steps which must be taken, and their sequence? What steps do you take, in what order?
The most basic instruction I can give you as a guide for a living process, is that you move with certainty. That means, you take small steps, one at a time, deciding only what you know. You try never to take a step which is a guess or a “why don’t we try this?” Large-scale trial-and-error, shots in the dark, simply do not work. Rather, you move by slow, small decisions, deciding one thing, getting sure about it, and then moving on. When — on the one particular small issue at hand — you feel certain enough that you have it right, then you move on to the next small decision.

I do not mean that the decisions should be small in physical scale. Rather, I mean that the content of each decision should be limited to a particular subject, to some feature of the design, disconnected from other matters, and floating, to an extent, by itself.

As far as the scale of the decisions is concerned — that, on the contrary, should be rather large. At the beginning, especially, you need to work mainly with the largest questions. Many of the issues you need to settle, in the early stages of your work, have to do with the whole, the global quality of the design.

Each step is, in a sense, a return to the whole and starting over with a “first step”. So, in the same breath, we must recognize that to take a good step, the main problem is to avoid taking any of the many possible false steps.

It is more likely that the first possibilities that present themselves to our minds will be bad ones, rather than good ones. We should therefore be extremely skeptical about the first possibilities that present themselves to our minds. We should run through the possibilities very fast, and reject most of them. If we do accept one, we should accept it, reluctantly, only when we finally encounter something for which no good reason presents itself to reject it, which appears genuinely wonderful to us, and which demonstrably makes the feeling of the whole become more profound.

Virtually all the shocking blunders and horrors of modern and postmodern architecture may be understood like this. They turned out bad mainly because they were unexamined experimentally. The designer did not take the time to examine the different possible steps in the evolution of the form and, at each step, seek out — with care — that one of these which has the deepest feeling: hence which of the possible steps does the most to extend and protect the world in that place.
The vital point is that this is an empirical matter. It can be discovered by experiment (in the real place, or in a model, or in other sufficiently “real” simulations). But it will not be discovered, unless the experiment is done — through models and in the designer’s mind, while the designer is running through possible steps to take.
The one exception occurs when the designer is deeply in touch with the wholeness that is there, and can summon up, very rapidly, a genuine structure-preserving transformation as an intuitive response which springs directly from the wholeness, in the designer’s mind.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/9 The whole#