A specification is not bureaucracy
It is the part of the design that survives you.
Everything an architect draws is an instruction to people we will mostly never meet. The joiner who cuts the housing, the mason who sets the course and the fitter who hangs the leaf read what we wrote, not what we meant. If the drawing says "high quality", we have said nothing, and we have quietly handed the decision to whoever is standing there on a Thursday afternoon with a deadline.
So we write numbers instead. A tolerance. A datum. A hold point before the visible material goes on. The section is checked against the plan and the reflected ceiling plan together, because a building that is correct in three drawings separately is still wrong in the room.
None of this is a love of paperwork. It is the only way the care survives the eighteen months between the design and the finished thing, and the only honest way to ask a contractor to be precise, which is to be precise first.
We work this way in Stockholm and in New York, which are not otherwise alike.
The joints are drawn and agreed before they are made.