Visual Order and Working Order

From Two Cheers for Anarchism:

Like the city official peering down at the architect’s proposed model of a new development site, we are all prone to the error of equating visual order with working order and visual complexity with disorder. It is a natural and, I believe, grave mistake, and one strongly associated with modernism.

A few pages before the text quoted above, the author discusses planned communities that might be attractive from Superman’s perspective flying over the city but that the people on the ground find unlivable.

I thought about failed software projects with beautiful architecture diagrams and successful software projects with ugly architectural diagrams, or even no architectural diagrams. Visual order and working order may go together, but often they do not.