A dance of chance and circumstance and imperfection and character and all inclines to order.

18 May, 2025

Some old things published elsewhere elsewhen.

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A dance of chance & circumstance

Though as profession architecture may seem the pursuit, as study the consideration, and as phenomenon the manifestation of permanence, it is in each case instead the make, measure and matter of milestones on an infinite road.

It is the conscious formation of matter into space, it is the matter thus formed, it is the formalisation of the matter of the conscious formation of matter.

It is a matter ultimately though of immateriality. All matter's as dust, the only distinction whether it be gathering or parting.

One of the Dutchmen once wrote of an ideal form and counterform of building and activity, the former and latter of each pair such as to be together one coherent whole. Even more than that though should the form be as good as incidental, extant only as response to lived life. Dwelling is living is building and so forth.

There's an unmade joke about the architect who struggled with object permanence. The sounds from the other side of the wall were to him as disembodied phenomena from some separate dimension.

To the great glory of a god or ourselves is also the process, not alone the stones but also the struggle to place each one on the last. In all building is integrity of process and form; in its character is a measure of the quality of the integration.

As character's measure of quality, quality's likewise mere measure of character.

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All inclines to order.

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The inevitable breakdown of all things is not chaos, destruction or decline, but rather elaborated agency, not disorder but distributed order. All agents thus empowered, mineral, vegetable and animal, pursue their own ends through their own means, ordering to suit.

With this greater distribution of agency, with more agents, are more discrete instances of distinct order. Agents combine, divide, and recombine, acting sometimes with each other, sometimes against, creating together orders of order - nested orders infinite in all directions, within, without and parallel.

Fewer and larger agents lead to simple order and homogeneity. Homogeneity will always ultimately be as untenable as it is undesirable; there are everywhere infinite independently-minded agents motivated to act and seeking opportunity. Within simple order and homogeneity will usually be the order of some overarching agent acting as constraint to the ordering acts of others: there will always thus follow either rupture in the large, general frustration in the many, or both, with the asserted agency of the many acting against such constraint where it exists.

Many agents lead to a complex order inclining to heterogeneity, an order not amenable to easy understanding or control, having within it the greatest degree of freedom for the greatest number. Such decentralised and complex order can seem chaos or threat to the simple-minded or authoritarian, but it is the inevitable order of things, a proper order and the order of the democratic, with all equally empowered.

We'd call it the natural order of things, and natural order is a fluid order - combining, recombining and so forth.

We should call it appropriate model for any act of architectural design, wherein each agent is empowered to pursue their own appropriate order, wherein the nested complexities of many orders are mutually reinforcing and balanced. Ultimately though, any act of architectural design is a discrete act of singular agency subject in its own turn to the whims and humours of all those usual agents to the processes of planning, construction and inhabitation that accompany the act (or the acts that form the act) and are in train in its wake.

Order is a top-down imposition in the usual contemporary conception of building procurement - the impulsive and unpredictable ordering acts of the many pose too great a risk to the financial models of development sponsor-profiteers. Such people require predictability, but allowance for unpredictability, for tolerance and flex, is an absolute and unavoidable social and environmental necessity. Imposition of limits in an attempt to guarantee predictability is antisocial, intolerant, environmentally detrimental, and is, again and as usual, entirely untenable.

In ideal order is good balance of independence and interdependence. To none should be undue constraint, to each should be opportunity, to all should be mutuality.

Architecture is ideal order and ideal order is entirely subjective. At some point a choice is made.

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Imperfection and character

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To be perfect is to be truly ordinary, without fault, distinction or character, absolutely to the standard and without any point of difference. In procuring a building, we must of course imagine the work just so, perfect and without defect. To specify imperfect work would likely lead to litigation.

But perfection can’t exist. This is balm to the overachieving child, this is excuse for poor results, this is universal truth: nothing remains the same, everything is in flux, no state is fixed so no ideal state can exist.

So back to the work specified. It will be perfect, thus right (which it can’t be) or imperfect, thus wrong (which it must be). It’s then merely a question of tolerance.

The quality of imperfection inherent in much of beauty is well marked. This imperfection can be a result of the thing’s production – neither man, machine nor nature will ever do a like thing twice without difference. It can be a result of the thing’s age – no fixed state exists, and from the time of any thing’s completion are the entropic effects of nature brought to bear.

Such is evolutionary process: we arrive to some present state through accumulated imperfection, and no sooner have we arrived than on we move again.

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It's no contrarian impulse to say the above, no semantic quibble and no poetic contrivance. An impulse towards perfection is one towards an all-questions-answered tight-fit solution, that conceives of no open ends, so none of the great creative and generative possibilities and opportunities that such open ends offer.

Such perfection in building design would assume that all questions can be answered prior to construction even beginning, when we surely know that there are questions one couldn’t even have conceived of that will present themselves long after an 'official' process of construction is deemed complete.

We don't aim for imperfection but we certainly won't disdain it, and we don't disdain perfection but we certainly won't aim for it. We may in fact say that in aiming for perfection we’d guarantee glaring imperfection, and imperfection of a type more fault than feature.

The key is in the degree of tolerance allowed. Too great a degree of tolerance can lead to poor performance, with the looseness of standards and the inefficiency it implies. Too little tolerance allows too little room for error, and if we agree as argued above that perfection can't actually exist then we must contend with this low tolerance introducing greater risk of failure.

Of these two choices, greater tolerance or less, we would contend both that there is a sweet spot of tolerance, and that if one must err then one should do so on the side of the greater, given the margin thus offered for both error and amelioration. Putting it succinctly: seeking perfection leaves no room for correction.

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