10 Working on integrated wholes

In much 20th-century construction, the building process was torn apart into sub-specialties, subcontracts. […] All this was done partly because of the influence of Taylor’s ideas on time and motion, from about 1900. It fits, too, the specialization of trades, the power of unions, and it fits with the analytical conception of an efficient contract.
The problem with this approach is that the actual construction process then goes forward as a series of disjointed operations, which have no natural connection with the naturally occurring wholes — centers — in the building. […] A natural process in which new centers appear and are strengthened and elaborated has no relation to these divided specialties. The men and women who do the work have no natural satisfaction when their particular job of work is finished; naturally occurring wholes and centers do not develop smoothly; the building goes up as a series of fragments. All this makes the appearance of life in the building most unlikely, indeed virtually impossible.

The essence of a successful construction process — I have discovered over the years — is that the team working on a given part of a building have the satisfaction of working on a psychological whole and making it complete. When they are finished with a articular phase of work, they have created a visible, palpable whole.
I do not mean by this that they have necessarily reached a completely finished part of a building. Indeed, that is the opposite of what I mean. What I mean is that at each important step, some new whole has been sufficiently delineated, and sufficiently filled in, so that one feels the new whole and grasps the way in which it contributes to the wholeness of the larger building. It is in this all-important psychological sense that an achieved whole which intensifies a given center is brought far enough along, so that its impact on the entire building, and its successful injection of more life into the building, becomes clear. That is where the team’s satisfaction and the craftsmen’s satisfaction comes from. They feel satisfaction because they have completed a whole. And they have been able to achieve this because their job description, or craft, gives them the leeway to have impact on the details of what they are doing, are therefore able to control the whole, in all its details, and can therefore create the subtle adaptations between the parts that are necessary to create a living whole.

Often I had to hire teams of people who — from the outside world — looked almost inexperienced, because their ability to integrate these many trades in one holistic operation was more significant to me than their degree of skill in any one operation.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/15 All Building as Making#