7 Introduction to discussion of process for a larger building

Perhaps the most difficult thing about big buildings — especially public buildings — is the fact that the process needed to design them and to build them really has to be remarkable.

When a building becomes really big, all these tasks are more difficult dynamically, and require feats of administration that may seem almost unsolvable. As a result, in 20th-century projects, the issues of budget, coordination of effort, administration, organization, and construction process, almost inevitably led to mechanization — and then of course to loss of life — for the buildings which resulted.

For the largest buildings we have barely yet even been able to imagine the right kind of process. The contingencies of contract administration coordination and the yearning for an inner life of the building are so far apart in the largest modern projects, no one, I think, has yet been fully able to put the two together.

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