A Metaphor

Looking at the Brooklyn Bridge from the waterfront on the Brooklyn side:

Each of the four main cables is attached to one of the four deck-stiffening trusses below by the vertical suspender cables. The towers are separately attached to the trusses by the diagonal brace cables in the same four planes as the suspender cables. (The planes defined by the center pair of cables are not vertical; those defined by the outer pair of cables are either vertical or close enough to it that the difference is not perceptible.) The Brooklyn tower is just out of frame to the right, and that ugly glob on the lower left is a maintenance platform suspended from the deck.

Warning: heavy-handed metaphor approaching fast! The location of each one of those cables was very carefully considered in the design and was very carefully made real, first in the original construction and then in various repairs to the suspender and brace cables and charges to the trusses. But from this angle, with the four not-exactly-parallel planes of cables running close to vertical and in four separate fans, it’s a huge mess. It looks like an explosion in a harp factory. The rationality of a design is not always visible and in some designs may be difficult to see from any angle. But it’s a mistake to assume that seeing a mess means there is nothing but a mess present. Changing your angle – real in this case (go up on the bridge deck and the cable layout suddenly looks more logical) and metaphorical in others – will change how you perceive the logic of a design.