When the builder has finished erecting the structure, the user or occupant takes over. Sometimes they never meet. This is a task for which most users are ill-suited. Once the building is occupied, the only viable means for feedback to the process usually come wrapped in lawsuits. The traditional approach generates static, non-living artifacts which can only be torn down in response to a wide range of demands upon their flexibility.
Life becomes an unending compromise.
Over the past several decades the construction industry has moved to a more feedback-driven model. Here the architect and builder work as a team from the early stages of design through the completion of the structure. The user is involved as well, but again, not as a true user and occupant but as an unskilled co-designer. All too often the user's ignorance of the technical issues renders him something of a nuisance to be tolerated rather than a collaborator to be engaged with. We live and work in graceless, unforgiving, unyielding structures that only seem to frustrate our ambitions and attenuate our visions.