Theft at the Public Till
carried in more than one way -- i e., through more than one path through the structure -- and must be considered a needed characteristic in any large structure or any structure whose failure may cause extensive damage or loss of life Redundancy implies that a structure can carry loads by more than one mechanism-that is, that the forces on it can follow alternate paths to the ground. It guarantees that if one mechanism fails, loads can still be carried by other mechanisms. Consider, for example, a tower firmly supported on four legs The failure of one leg will severely cripple the tower, but the tower may still survive, although the remaining three legs are overloaded, because the rest of the structure will adapt itself to carrying the load by redistributing it to the remaining legs. Today buckling is considered a very dangerous structural phenomenon because our strong materials allow us fo design thin element, in compression (columns, struts. arches, and domes) that buckle without giving notice. Government reacts to unexpected change the only way it allows itself to re- act: it bears down and works even harder to be more objective and to create new procedures to restore order. The only way to stop the engine is either to eliminate change, which seems unlikely, or to cut off the engine’s fueling assumptions. If the program were designed with flexibility, and with redun- dancy, perhaps some of the strains and stresses could be better handled and the equivalent of a buckled bridge or a collapse building avoided. While material objects usually start out as representations of things to be built, architecture carries over into the processes by which they are constructed, used, and managed. A building, for example, is redesigned when working drawings are converted to a physical structure on a, site and again whenever owners or users appropriate it and adapt it to their needs. Competent architects, attentive to the life of the object in its environment, learn to expect and prepare for the possibility that, over time, new meanings will attach themselves to the object they have designed and that modifica- tions will be made. This is the very process our government lacks. In the virtual world of policy design, as in an architect’s studio, the rep- resentation of a policy object is initially under the control of a architecture
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