From Carlotti’s Beauty Or How To Avoid Partial Optimizations…

An Italian painter, named Carlotti, defined beauty as the summation of the parts working together in such a way that nothing needed to be added, taken away or altered. This is exactly what architects should try to remember once they start analyzing (the beauty of) their enterprises. So what is the message? First, if you draw a border around something complex (look at the pictures below to see what I mean), and then analyze only that segment, domain, part, subset, artefact, component or whatever you wanna call it, chances are you loose the big picture. Second, if you have analyzed the subset and try to improve/change/transform only that part without looking at the whole, chances are you destroy some part of the existing beauty. Finally: before judging the subset you have analyzed, first try to discover the beauty of the whole and then make it even more beautiful…