10 Emergence of new multi-level contracts for large buildings

Essence of new type of architectural construction contract

1. Price is fixed.
2. What is agreed is only building outline and rough plan.
3. Modifications unfold as the construction goes forward. Changes are made continuously throughout construction by architect and builder; without change orders.
4. The object is to build the best possible building for the given sum.
5. Made possible by: holding price fixed, giving architect-builder the right to re-distribute funds continuously within building operations, and changing designs as construction and evolving changes go forward.
6. Construction is run under fixed percentage management contract with open books.
7. Since builder’s money is fixed, there is no incentive to reduce quality in order to gain profit.
8. Builder has obligation and discretion to discuss with client as the building unfolds, but the builder’s decision is final.

Given our current social circumstances, it is not always possible to implement this kind of contract in a large project, in its pure form.
More typically, to meet the complex social conditions of a large project, we have to compromise, and use a variety of contract modifications in which the essence of this method can be preserved (meaning that the essence of the fundamental process is preserved as the core of what is going on), while still working to some degree in the framework of normal 20th- and post-20th-century process.
In all the modified cases, there is still, at the core of the process, a new form of management in which each craftsman and builder is devoted to the making of living structure. This is a new way of designing. It is a new way of imagining the building. It creates a new way of introducing living structure, feeling, even into these gigantic constructions, by relying on archetypal facts, always keeping real human scale in mind, always doing the thing which injects feeling into the structure. It relies, always, on a way of making sure that the building creates positive space near it, around it, next to it.

In software we don’t have a sense of scale. A function call can be so opaque to us that we don’t know if it’ll execute just a few (or even no) instructions, or if it branches out to several massive frameworks resulting in millions of executed instructions, or anything in between. How we structure function calls has little to do with instruction count. Perhaps that’s not a useful metric. Neither is lines of code then. We don’t have a sense for scale, because we don’t have a sense for size.

#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/4 Large public buildings#