Over the years, many members of the medical profession have tended to specialize. There are doctors who concentrate on the lungs, others only deal with the brain, and some are devoted to the skin. As a result, their concentration of knowledge is in one narrow field, and they aren’t always very aware of developments in other specialties, or of how the different specialties interact. House construction has followed a similar path.
Plumbers know about plumbing systems and heating contractors know about furnace systems, but neither may fully understand what the other is doing. Just as we are seeing a need for a more holistic approach to medicine, we need to start looking at houses in a holistic manner. Just as the human body is a collection of systems that function as a whole, so is a house. We should not look at a house as an assemblage of lumber, pipes, and wires. It is a large integrated system consisting of several smaller systems. How all the components are assembled ends up being just as important as which pieces are selected.
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