In its details of construction it still falls far behind

"It has great beauty of layout. But in its details of construction it still falls far behind. Indeed, in its construction it is completely spoiled. For reasons outside our control, it was necessary that this particular building, once laid out, was then "detailed" by ordinary processes. It was taken to the drawing board, by people who had not laid it out, far from the site, and given mechanical "drawn" details, quite inappropriate to its design... until it became, in the end, no different from a thousand ordinary buildings of our time. In short, it was almost destroyed, because it was not built in the right way. At first I hesitated, I was not sure whether to write this, or whether to include the picture, because it is so sad and so depressing. But then I realized how essential it is to include it: because many people may be willing to lay out a building in the way I have described, and will then try to get it built from drawings. "

I love how Alexander spends a whole chapter talking about this beautiful design they created, only to have it be utterly butchered when it came to the actual implementation. “Looks great in Figma”. You see this a lot in software where the end result looks like nothing the designer envisioned and this usually happens when the engineers are the people who “had not laid it out” and are too “far from the site”. Or rather, “throwing designs over the wall”.