I came across this brilliant article while reading about the big ball of mud design pattern. This design pattern is what you end up with if you don’t do any architecture and the system just grows. It’s not a design pattern so much as what happens when you just keep pushing to get something that works. It’s actually a very popular pattern. I found myself nodding all the way throught the article. I will not comment about what projects I’ve worked on which match these criteria!
http://www.laputan.org/gabriel/worse-is-better.html
It talks about why Lisp is in such a mess even though it has been finally standardised and is such an excellent language. Again very interesting. Higly recommended.