It makes a difference whether an object’s dependence upon a context manifests itself as interference with its shape or as a modulation of it. A tree impeded by its neighbors may be stunted on one side. In a natural setting, this partial setback makes sense as a response to prevailing conditions, and to that extent it fits the ecological order of its surroundings.
Even so, looked at by itself, the tree may be ugly. This is so not because its inherent structure has been interfered with, but because the interference has rent, not modified, the structure. If in comparison one looks at the windswept pines of the California coast, there, too, one notices incompleteness unless one perceives the wind as a part of the order. In the latter case, the trees’ deflection from their inherent symmetry does not play havoc with structure. It rather overlays it with a new vector, which has been incorporated in a restructuring of the whole. The order of the object has been shifted to a higher level of complexity.
(RUDOLF ARNHEIM, 1975)