A gradual refinement The steel rail is an artifact whose form has been carefully optimized. This gradual refinement of the design was done not by a single brilliant engineer but by more than a century of industrial evolution. The rail was never meant to be an object of beauty, but its cross section has all the elegance of fine typography. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape elegancetypographytransportationevolutionchange
How things ought to be It is hard to give up preconceptions of what things “ought to be,” and recognize things as they really are. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building The way of things wisdom