13 Summary
It means that each detail must be shaped within the context of the construction; it must get its form from its surroundings, be shaped in response to a larger whole. Above all, the elements cannot be fully planned on paper ahead of time, or prefabricated, and only then given to a general contractor to assemble. They must be thought out, felt, by an adaptive physical and human process in which you — the builder — experiment with the real materials, allow the construction details to emerge from your experience with the real materials, from the real context of the building.
Fascinatingly, reading this summary feels like reading an explanation on why I somehow feel suspect about software that’s been constructed with importing a large number of external frameworks and feel better about software crafted with making deliberate choices on which external frameworks are absolutely necessary. It is obvious that both extremes are clearly wrong: it doesn’t make much sense to try to import thousands of frameworks and have almost no code to take advantage of them; it also doesn’t make much sense to avoid frameworks altogether and rebuild everything from scratch. Yet, I feel that Alexander’s perspective about wholeness must lie closer to the simplicity of importing few frameworks and building out the important parts yourself, so that your application can adapt its most important pieces precisely to what the person using it needs to get their task done.
This requires a level of involvement between the men and women making the building with you, and the individual physical materials of which the building is made. It makes an unbroken line of connection and control going on continuously throughout the construction — something which just is not possible when the professions of design and building are separated.
That requires a new way of thinking about construction. In this new way, we shall judge building details not only according to their cost and their efficiency — but also, and perhaps more particularly, according to the degree that each component allows itself to be shot, carved, shaped, molded by its position in the greater whole, to become identifiable, unique, a living thing.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/15 All Building as Making#