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
Each element performs many functions Each element in the system should be chosen and placed so that it performs as many functions as possible. Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture The multiplicity of living patterns function