1 How may we approach truly gigantic construction projects

In the traditional world, labor was cheap, time was elastic. Craftsmen could spend weeks, months, years patiently shaping each stone, or brick, to fit a wall, and could make each part with loving care so that it fit, perfectly, into the harmony of the whole.
In the modern world, labor is expensive, money is all-important, and time whizzes by; speed is most essential of all. Much building production hinges on mass production and assembly of millions of identical components.

In this chapter I shall therefore describe a new form of production which we may call high-speed adaptive production, and discuss some of the conditions which may allow us to obtain beautiful and intimate results, even in the most gigantic projects. We shall aim to achieve this goal by careful harvesting of high-speed mass-production techniques, personal technique, computer-aided technology, new ways of managing and dividing items within a giant project to create the best effect — all ways, in short, which are economically feasible in our time and will be in the future, as ways of creating things with a depth and intimate relation to ourselves that seemed impossible in the 20th century.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/17 The production of giant projects#