The 20th-century passion for rigidity came, in part, from Frederick Taylor's scientific management, which deliberately destroyed craft knowledge and separated conception from execution.

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

• The core of the modern design movement—striving for originality, newness, breaking with tradition—was a structure-destroying force that denied unfolding.claim0.790
  Fundamental critique of modernism.
• The pursuit of wholeness, pure and simple, was at odds with virtually every institutional and social reality of the 20th century.claim0.780
  Alexander's summary of his forty-year experience that acting for wholeness inevitably brought him into conflict with existing processes.
• After 1900, a variety of modern building processes came into use that are not structure-preserving—some accidentally structure-destroying, others actively promoting ugliness for profit.claim0.768
  Historical shift.
• The industrial process of the early 20th century was an unfolding process in its straightforward directness, creating I-like centers.claim0.761
  Explanation for why early industrial landscapes had life, in contrast to post-industrial image-driven processes.
• The gist of the process, what I call the formal or brutal process, lies in the use of very simple geometry, first introduced with force, after one makes sure that the inspiration has arisen from the place, and from the introduction, then, of just enough syncopation into the order, so that it truly fits the necessities of site and place and time, without doing violence to them.claim0.756
  Summarizes the brutal process as force-first geometry, then syncopated adaptation to fit context without violence
• Late-20th-century holistic science still describes mechanisms; it has not overcome the mechanistic character of its models.claim0.753
  Even the beautiful descriptions of wholeness by scientists like Mae-Wan Ho remain mechanistic in detail and have not solved the bifurcation.
• Understaffed planning departments forced to follow rigid rules were strongly biased toward large-scale projects because they reduced workload, leading to destruction of urban fabric.claim0.753
  Institutional analysis of planning.
• The processes needed to create life were damaged in the 20th century.claim0.753
  Explains why profound life is less common in modern buildings.