| ... there is seldom so much perfection
in works composed of many separate parts, upon which different hands had
been employed, as in those completed by a single master. Thus
it is observable that the buildings which a single architect has planned
and executed, are generally more elegant and commodious than those which
several have attempted to improve, by making old walls serve for purposes
for which they were not originally built. Thus also, those ancient
cities which, from being at first only villages, have become, in course
of time, large towns, are usually but ill laid out compared with the regularity
of constructed towns which a professional architect has freely planned
on an open plain; so that although the several
buildings of the former may often equal or surpass in beauty those of the
latter, yet when one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition, there
a large one and here a small, and the consequent crookedness
and irregularity of the streets, one is disposed to allege that chance
rather than any human will guided by reason must have led to such an arrangement.
Rene Descartes (1637): Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, Part I |