Architectural Engineer Quotes

The ideal architect should be a man of letters, a skillful draftsman, a mathematician, familiar with historical studies, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.

I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.

An architect knows something about everything. An engineer knows everything about one thing.

For the first time in architectural history, we're approaching the resolution and complexity of the natural world by creating new technologies that will ultimately enable us to design a beam as if it were a branch or an HVAC and waste removal system as if it were a photosynthetic GI tract engineered to convert carbon into biofuel.

When we're able to communicate in nature's language; when we're able to transcend the view that nature is a boundless entity; even transcending the building as the kernel of the architectural project; when we invite scientific inquiry and technological innovation, fusing atoms with bits and bits with genes - only then will the art of building enable new forms of interaction between humans and their environment. Only then will we be able to design, construct and evolve as equals.

From a limited pallet of molecular components including cellulose, chitosan, and pectin; the very same materials found in trees, crustaceans and apple skins - natural systems embody an extensive array of functional materials that outperform human engineered ones through their resilience, sustainability and adaptability.

A skyscraper is not a tree - not yet.

For centuries architects have been taught to sketch, model and build in three static dimensions - x, y and z. But the natural world offers contexts that are much more dimensionally complex and dynamic.

Since our divorce from nature with the industrial revolution, the major challenge for architecture remains a challenge of language as we replace units of growth with units of construction.

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.

When we say that the ancestors of the Blacks, who today live mainly in Black Africa, were the first to invent mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, sciences in general, arts, religion, agriculture, social organization, medicine, writing, technique, architecture; that they were the first to erect buildings out of 6 million tons of stone (the Great Pyramid) as architects and engineers—not simply as unskilled laborers; that they built the immense temple of Karnak, that forest of columns with its famed hypostyle hall large enough to hold Notre-Dame and its towers; that they sculpted the first colossal statues (Colossi of Memnon, etc.)—when we say all that we are merely expressing the plain unvarnished truth that no one today can refute by arguments worthy of the name.

A basic principle of data processing teaches the folly of trying to maintain independent files in synchonism.

All race conditions, deadlock conditions, and concurrent update problems are due to mutable variables.

Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new.

With us, our Priests are Administrators of all Business, Art, and Science; Directors of Trade, Commerce, Generalship, Architecture, Engineering, Education, Statesmanship, Legislature, Morality, Theology; doing nothing themselves, they are the Causes of everything worth doing, that is done by others.

For a thing’s beauty we ought to compliment not its owner but its maker.

A digital computer is essentially a huge army of clerks, equipped with rule books, pencil and paper, all stupid and entirely without initiative, but able to follow millions of precisely defined operations. The difficulty lies in handing over the rule book.

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207)

To speak in nature's language, we must prioritize bio-based structural materials; biopolymers. Biopolymers are natural polymers produced by the cells of living organisms. We're already utilizing them in products, pharma, and even in fashion. But to deploy them on the architectural scale, we need to invest in design and construction technologies that emulate their heirarchical properties by engineering real time chemical formation.

In order to create a sustainable world, we need to: 1) Educate people. 2) Educate people. 3) Educate people. For every person left uneducated about the system of this sphere, the nature will make us all pay for it. Sustainability can only start in the mind.

The perfect kind of architecture decision is the one which never has to be made

He wanted to be deafened by the thunder of her engines, he needed to be drained of every thought by the cold, the noise, the equal amounts of boredom and adrenalin. He had believed once that he would be formed by the architecture of war, but now he realized, he had been erased by it.

Not exactly a certified philosopher—my degree is in engineering and architecture, but my true home was philosophy, and even at the Polytechnic I found some learned professors who guided my private readings.

Trying to design or reclaim places is, therefore, rather like trying to make or modify life itself. In this effort, it is wisest to adopt the gentle patient manner of an environmental midwife, while rejecting utterly the machine-driven arrogance of some environmental equivalent to a genetic engineer. By such gentle means places might flourish again, but also the world might become less threatened.

The intelligence we will create from the reverse-engineering of the brain will have access to its own source code and will be able to rapidly improve itself in an accelerating iterative design cycle. Although there is considerable plasticity in the biological human brain, as we have seen, it does have a relatively fixed architecture, which cannot be significantly modified, as well as a limited capacity. We are unable to increase its 300 million pattern recognizers to, say, 400 million unless we do so nonbiologically. Once we can achieve that, there will be no reason to stop at a particular level of capability. We can go on to make it a billion pattern recognizers, or a trillion.

Conway’s law: Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Architecture must be carefully distinguished from implementation. As Blaauw has said, "Where architecture tells what happens, implementation tells how it is made to happen.

When a child has learned this architecture, he can tell time as easily from a wristwatch as from a church tower.

Only women could bleed without injury or death; only they rose from the gore each month like a phoenix; only their bodies were in tune with the ululations of the universe and the timing of the tides. Without this innate lunar cycle, how could men have a sense of time, tides, space, seasons, movement of the universe, or the ability to measure anything at all? How could men mistress the skills of measurement necessary for mathematics, engineering, architecture, surveying—and so many other professions? In Christian churches, how could males, lacking monthly evidence of Her death and resurrection, serve the Daughter of the Goddess? In Judaism, how could they honor the Matriarch without the symbol of Her sacrifices recorded in the Old Ovariment? Thus insensible to the movements of the planets and the turning of the universe, how could men become astronomers, naturalists, scientists—or much of anything at all?

Indeed, "brute force" solutions are often characteristic of advanced cultures, not primitive ones. The Romans and their predecessors spent a long time figuring out how to build arches... and virtually all our buildings today use post-and-lintel construction, precisely what the arch was devised to replace. We have better materials and more money, and given that, arches are usually not worth the extra complexity.

An architect is a generalist, not a specialist-the conductor of a symphony, not a virtuoso who plays every instrument perfectly. As a practitioner, an architect coordinates a team of professionals that include structural and mechanical engineers, interior designers, building-code consultants, landscape architects, specifications writers, contractors, and specialists from other disciplines. Typically, the interests of some team members will compete with the interests of others. An architect must know enough about each discipline to negotiate and synthesize competing demands while honoring the needs of the client and the integrity of the entire project.

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

They came to me because they had finally realized, after years of observation and experience, that the highest-paid personnel in engineering are frequently not those who know the most about engineering. One can, for example, hire mere technical ability in engineering, accountancy, architecture or any other profession at nominal salaries. But the person who has technical knowledge plus the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people—that person is headed for higher earning power.

some of the very people who are developing search algorithms and architecture are willing to promote sexist and racist attitudes openly at work and beyond, while we are supposed to believe that these same employees are developing “neutral” or “objective” decision-making tools.

First, the probability of fire causing the total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise building is exceedingly low. Such an event has never occurred prior to or since September 11, 2001. On the other hand, every total collapse of a steel-framed high-rise building in history has been caused by controlled demolition.

If engineering cannot tell us what our houses should look like, nor in a pluralistic and non-deferential world can precedent or tradition, we must be free to pursue all stylistic options. We should acknowledge that the question of what is beautiful is both impossible to elucidate and shameful and even undemocratic to mention.

This is the philosophy of YAGNI: “You aren’t going to need it.” There is wisdom in this message, since over-engineering is often much worse than under-engineering. On the other hand, when you discover that you truly do need an architectural boundary where none exists, the costs and risks can be very high to add such a boundary.

Connascence, in the context of software engineering, refers to the degree of coupling between software components. (Connascence.io hosts a handy reference to the various types of connascence.) Software components are connascent if a change in one would require the other(s) to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system.

When Dad wasn’t telling us about all the amazing things he had already done, he was telling us about the wondrous things he was going to do. Like build the Glass Castle. All of Dad’s engineering skills and mathematical genius were coming together in one special project: a great big house he was going to build for us in the desert. It would have a glass ceiling and thick glass walls and even a glass staircase. The Glass Castle would have solar cells on the top that would catch the sun’s rays and convert them into electricity for heating and cooling and running all the appliances. It would even have its own water-purification system. Dad had worked out the architecture and the floor plans and most of the mathematical calculations. He carried around the blueprints for the Glass Castle wherever we went, and sometimes he’d pull them out and let us work on the design for our rooms. All we had to do was find gold, Dad said, and we were on the verge of that. Once he finished the Prospector and we struck it rich, he’d start work on our Glass Castle.

The reason for the difference between the architectural and engineering 'climate', so to speak, is very complex. It is partly a matter of terminology, partly a matter of historical accident, and the consequent training of architects and engineers, and mostly a matter of what is commonly supposed to be the difference in content or context - architecture being concerned with producing works of art; engineering with utility structures.

We tend to think of grand organizations like corporations or empires coming about through deliberate human planning: designing the conceptual architecture for each imposing structure, brick by brick. But the shape an institution ultimately takes is not so much designed in advance by a master engineer as it is carved away by challenges to its outer boundaries, the way a coastline is partly formed by an endless battering of much smaller waves.

There is a tendency to romanticize the abilities of the ancient Egyptians because they produced structures that were miraculous for their time and certainly would pose a serious challenge to ours. They were somehow immensely more talented with sticks and stones than modern researchers have been able to demonstrate using the same implements. When pondering the theories proffered by Egyptologists, one gets the impression that an ancient Egyptian quarry worker was like a maestro playing a complete symphony on a violin made of a cigar box and a stick and producing the quality of a Stradivarius. The argument is pleasing and poetic, but the trouble is that, metaphorically speaking, when modern scholars make a violin from a cigar box and a stick, its results are precisely what you would expect from a cigar box and a stick. So the question persists: From what instruments did the symphonic architecture of Egypt materialize?

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect. The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word "Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and numinous aura)—which balcony means that

wheelchair-accessible front ramp, take a bit of getting used to, and some like the engineer never do get comfortable with them and use the less garish auditory side-doors; and the abundant sulcus-fissures and gyrus-bulges of the slick latex roof make rain-drainage complex and footing chancy at best, so there’s not a whole lot of recreational strolling up here, although a kind of safety-balcony of skull-colored polybutylene resin, which curves around the midbrain from the inferior frontal sulcus to the parietooccipital sulcus—a halo-ish ring at the level of like eaves, demanded by the Cambridge Fire Dept. over the heated pro-mimetic protests of topological Rickeyites over in the Architecture Dept. (which the M.I.T. administration, trying to placate Rickeyites and C.F.D. Fire Marshal both, had had the pre-molded resin injected with dyes to render it the distinctively icky brown-shot off-white of living skull, so that the balcony resembles at once corporeal bone and

In this section I have tried to demonstrate that Darwinian thinking does live up to its billing as universal acid: it turns the whole traditional world upside down, challenging the top-down image of designs flowing from that genius of geniuses, the Intelligent Designer, and replacing it with the bubble-up image of mindless, motiveless cyclical processes churning out ever-more robust combinations until they start replicating on their own, speeding up the design process by reusing all the best bits over and over. Some of these earliest offspring eventually join forces (one major crane, symbiosis), which leads to multicellularity (another major crane), which leads to the more effective exploration vehicles made possible by sexual reproduction (another major crane), which eventually leads in one species to language and cultural evolution (cranes again), which provide the medium for literature and science and engineering, the latest cranes to emerge, which in turn permits us to “go meta” in a way no other life form can do, reflecting in many ways on who and what we are and how we got here, modeling these processes in plays and novels, theories and computer simulations, and ever-more thinking tools to add to our impressive toolbox. This perspective is so widely unifying and at the same time so generous with detailed insights that one might say it’s a power tool, all on its own. Those who are still strangely repelled by Darwinian thinking must consider the likelihood that if they try to go it alone with only the hand tools of tradition, they will find themselves laboring far from the cutting edge of research on important phenomena as diverse as epidemics and epistemology, biofuels and brain architecture, molecular genetics, music, and morality.

it was with a palpable sense of excitement that Woolly realized they were suddenly approaching the Brooklyn Bridge with every intention of driving across it. How truly majestic was its architecture, thought Woolly. How inspiring the cathedral-like buttresses and the cables that soared through the air. What a feat of engineering, especially since it had been built back in eighteen something-something, and ever since had supported the movement of multitudes from one side of the river to the other and back again, every single day. Surely, the Brooklyn Bridge deserved to be on the List.

Many researchers, who have been conditioned to using cognitive models, might not initially see the difference between “levels” and “layers.” With levels, processes are sequential (or, as electrical engineers would say, “in series”), while with a layered architecture, processing goes on simultaneously (“in parallel”). When processing through levels, all the steps are performed one after another, like a baton relay. You need one level to finish before the next one up can start. Processing in layers, on the other hand, can have all the runners leave at the same time and go different places. This change in architecture makes for big differences.

It’s hard to blame Representative Petri for missing the point. The value of studying fireflies is endlessly surprising. For example, before 1994, Internet engineers were vexed by spontaneous pulsations in the traffic between computers called routers, until they realized that the machines were behaving like fireflies, exchanging periodic messages that were inadvertently synchronizing them. Once the cause was identified, it became clear how to relieve the congestion. Electrical engineers devised a decentralized architecture for clocking computer circuits more efficiently, by mimicking the fireflies’ strategy for achieving synchrony at low cost and high reliability.

Modern architects and engineers are still trying to understand how the ancient Greeks were able to build the Parthenon in ten years when the restoration of the monument has continued for more than three decades and is still not complete. What they have learned and shared along this arduous path of rediscovery is that the Greeks were highly skilled at building visual compensations into their structures. Columns were crafted and positioned to compensate for how the eye interprets what it sees at a distance. Subtle variances in the surface of platforms, columns, and colonnades provide the appearance of geometric proportion, whereas if they had worked from the perspective of a flat datum surface, the brain would interpret the results as being slightly skewed.

The ideal of progress also should not be confused with the 20th-century movement to re-engineer society for the convenience of technocrats and planners, which the political scientist James Scott calls Authoritarian High Modernism.14 The movement denied the existence of human nature, with its messy needs for beauty, nature, tradition, and social intimacy. Starting from a “clean tablecloth,” the modernists designed urban renewal projects that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, windswept plazas, and brutalist architecture. “Mankind will be reborn,” they theorized, and “live in an ordered relation to the whole.” Though these developments were sometimes linked to the word progress, the usage was ironic: “progress” unguided by humanism is not progress.

Facebook’s own North American marketing director, Michelle Klein, who told an audience in 2016 that while the average adult checks his or her phone 30 times a day, the average millennial, she enthusiastically reported, checks more than 157 times daily. Generation Z, we now know, exceeds this pace. Klein described Facebook’s engineering feat: “a sensory experience of communication that helps us connect to others, without having to look away,” noting with satisfaction that this condition is a boon to marketers. She underscored the design characteristics that produce this mesmerizing effect: design is narrative, engrossing, immediate, expressive, immersive, adaptive, and dynamic.11 If you are over the age of thirty, you know that Klein is not describing your adolescence, or that of your parents, and certainly not that of your grandparents. Adolescence and emerging adulthood in the hive are a human first, meticulously crafted by the science of behavioral engineering; institutionalized in the vast and complex architectures of computer-mediated means of behavior modification; overseen by Big Other; directed toward economies of scale, scope, and action in the capture of behavioral surplus; and funded by the surveillance capital that accrues from unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power. Our children endeavor to come of age in a hive that is owned and operated by the applied utopianists of surveillance capitalism and is continuously monitored and shaped by the gathering force of instrumentarian power. Is this the life that we want for the most open, pliable, eager, self-conscious, and promising members of our society?

Search engines and social networks are analog computers of unprecedented scale. Information is being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by a fault-tolerant template rather than by an unforgiving numerical address. Pulse-frequency coding for the Internet is one way to describe the working architecture of a search engine, and PageRank for neurons is one way to describe the working architecture of the brain. These computational structures use digital components, but the analog computing being performed by the system as a whole exceeds the complexity of the digital code on which it runs. The model (of the social graph, or of human knowledge) constructs and updates itself.

We like to think of ourselves as immune from influence or our cognitive biases, because we want to feel like we are in control, but industries like alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and gaming all know we are creatures that are subject to cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. And tech has caught on to this with its research into “user experience,” “gamification,” “growth hacking,” and “engagement” by activating ludic loops and reinforcement schedules in the same way slot machines do. So far, this gamification has been contained to social media and digital platforms, but what will happen as we further integrate our lives with networked information architectures designed to exploit evolutionary flaws in our cognition? Do we really want to live in a “gamified” environment that engineers our obsessions and plays with our lives as if we are inside its game?

It turns out that thousands of new hippocampus cells are born naturally each day, but most die soon afterward. However, it was shown that rats that learned new skills retained more of their new cells. A combination of exercise and mood-elevating chemicals can also boost the survival rate of new hippocampus cells. It turns out that stress, on the contrary, accelerates the death of new neurons. In 2007, a breakthrough occurred when scientists in Wisconsin and Japan were able to take ordinary human skin cells, reprogram their genes, and turn them into stem cells. The hope is that these stem cells, either found naturally or converted using genetic engineering, can one day be injected into the brains of Alzheimer’s patients to replace dying cells. (These new brain cells, because they do not yet have the proper connections, would not be integrated into the brain’s neural architecture. This means that a person would have to relearn certain skills to incorporate these fresh new neurons.)

I propose that what we call “consciousness” is a feeling forming a backdrop to, or attached to, a current mental event or instinct. It is best grasped by considering a common engineering architecture called layering, which allows complex systems to function efficiently and in an integrated fashion, from atoms to molecules, to cells, to circuits, to cognitive and perceptual capacities. If the brain indeed consists of different layers (in the engineering sense), then information from a micro level may be integrated at higher and higher layers until each modular unit itself produces consciousness. A layer architecture allows for new levels of functioning to arise from lower-level functioning parts that could not create the “higher level” experience alone. It is time to learn more about layering and the wonders it brings to understanding brain architecture. We are on the road to realizing that consciousness is not a “thing.” It is the result of a process embedded in an architecture, just as a democracy is not a thing but the result of a process.

Nowadays, whether we like it or not, we are stuck with one form or another of advanced technology and we have got to make it work safely and efficiently: this involves, among other things, the intelligent application of structural theory. However, man does not live by safety and efficiency alone, and we have to face the fact that, visually, the world is becoming an increasingly depressing place. It is not, perhaps, so much the occurrence of what might be described as 'active ugliness' as the prevalence of the dull and the commonplace. Far too seldom is the heart rejoiced or does one feel any better or happier for looking at the works of modern man. Yet most of the artefacts of the eighteenth century, even quite humble and trivial ones, seem to many of us to be at least pleasing and sometimes incomparably beautiful. To that extent people—all people—in the eighteenth century lived richer lives than most of us do today. This is reflected in the prices we pay nowadays for period houses and antiques. A society which was more creative and self-confident would not feel quite so strong a nostalgia for its great-grandfathers' buildings and household looks.

By the architecture of a system, I mean the complete and detailed specification of the user interface. For a computer this is the programming manual. For a compiler it is the language manual. For a control program it is the manuals for the language or languages used to invoke its functions. For the entire system it is the union of the manuals the user must consult to do his entire job. The architect of a system, like the architect of a building, is the user's agent. It is his job to bring professional and technical knowledge to bear in the unalloyed interest of the user, as opposed to the interests of the salesman, the fabricator, etc.[2] Architecture must be carefully distinguished from implementation. As Blaauw has said, "Where architecture tells what happens, implementation tells how it is made to happen."[3] He gives as a simple example a clock, whose architecture consists of the face, the hands, and the winding knob. When a child has learned this architecture, he can tell time as easily from a wristwatch as from a church tower. The implementation, however, and its realization, describe what goes on inside the case—powering by any of many mechanisms and accuracy control by any of many.

2006 interview by Jim Gray, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recalled another watershed moment: We went through a period of serious introspection and concluded that a service-oriented architecture would give us the level of isolation that would allow us to build many software components rapidly and independently. By the way, this was way before service-oriented was a buzzword. For us service orientation means encapsulating the data with the business logic that operates on the data, with the only access through a published service interface. No direct database access is allowed from outside the service, and there’s no data sharing among the services.3 That’s a lot to unpack for non–software engineers, but the basic idea is this: If multiple teams have direct access to a shared block of software code or some part of a database, they slow each other down. Whether they’re allowed to change the way the code works, change how the data are organized, or merely build something that uses the shared code or data, everybody is at risk if anybody makes a change. Managing that risk requires a lot of time spent in coordination. The solution is to encapsulate, that is, assign ownership of a given block of code or part of a database to one team. Anyone else who wants something from that walled-off area must make a well-documented service request via an API.

Rome was not the first state of organized gangsterdom, nor was it the last; but it was the only one that managed to bamboozle posterity into an almost universal admiration. Few rational men admire the Huns, the Nazis or the Soviets; but for centuries, schoolboys have been expected to read Julius Caesar's militaristic drivel ("We inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy, our own casualties being very light") and Cato's revolting incitements to war. They have been led to believe that the Romans had attained an advanced level in the sciences, the arts, law, architecture, engineering and everything else. It is my opinion that the alleged Roman achievements are largely a myth; and I feel it is time for this myth to be debunked a little. What the Romans excelled in was bullying, bludgeoning, butchering and blood baths. Like the Soviet Empire, the Roman Empire enslaved peoples whose cultural level was far above their own. They not only ruthlessly vandalized their countries, but they also looted them, stealing their art treasures, abducting their scientists and copying their technical know-how, which the Romans' barren society was rarely able to improve on. No wonder, then, that Rome was filled with great works of art. But the light of culture which Rome is supposed to have emanated was a borrowed light: borrowed from the Greeks and the other peoples that the Roman militarists had enslaved.

Stanford University’s John Koza, who pioneered genetic programming in 1986, has used genetic algorithms to invent an antenna for NASA, create computer programs for identifying proteins, and invent general purpose electrical controllers. Twenty-three times Koza’s genetic algorithms have independently invented electronic components already patented by humans, simply by targeting the engineering specifications of the finished devices—the “fitness” criteria. For example, Koza’s algorithms invented a voltage-current conversion circuit (a device used for testing electronic equipment) that worked more accurately than the human-invented circuit designed to meet the same specs. Mysteriously, however, no one can describe how it works better—it appears to have redundant and even superfluous parts. But that’s the curious thing about genetic programming (and “evolutionary programming,” the programming family it belongs to). The code is inscrutable. The program “evolves” solutions that computer scientists cannot readily reproduce. What’s more, they can’t understand the process genetic programming followed to achieve a finished solution. A computational tool in which you understand the input and the output but not the underlying procedure is called a “black box” system. And their unknowability is a big downside for any system that uses evolutionary components. Every step toward inscrutability is a step away from accountability, or fond hopes like programming in friendliness toward humans. That doesn’t mean scientists routinely lose control of black box systems. But if cognitive architectures use them in achieving AGI, as they almost certainly will, then layers of unknowability will be at the heart of the system. Unknowability might be an unavoidable consequence of self-aware, self-improving software.

Bell resisted selling Texas Instruments a license. “This business is not for you,” the firm was told. “We don’t think you can do it.”38 In the spring of 1952, Haggerty was finally able to convince Bell Labs to let Texas Instruments buy a license to manufacture transistors. He also hired away Gordon Teal, a chemical researcher who worked on one of Bell Labs’ long corridors near the semiconductor team. Teal was an expert at manipulating germanium, but by the time he joined Texas Instruments he had shifted his interest to silicon, a more plentiful element that could perform better at high temperatures. By May 1954 he was able to fabricate a silicon transistor that used the n-p-n junction architecture developed by Shockley. Speaking at a conference that month, near the end of reading a thirty-one-page paper that almost put listeners to sleep, Teal shocked the audience by declaring, “Contrary to what my colleagues have told you about the bleak prospects for silicon transistors, I happen to have a few of them here in my pocket.” He proceeded to dunk a germanium transistor connected to a record player into a beaker of hot oil, causing it to die, and then did the same with one of his silicon transistors, during which Artie Shaw’s “Summit Ridge Drive” continued to blare undiminished. “Before the session ended,” Teal later said, “the astounded audience was scrambling for copies of the talk, which we just happened to bring along.”39 Innovation happens in stages. In the case of the transistor, first there was the invention, led by Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain. Next came the production, led by engineers such as Teal. Finally, and equally important, there were the entrepreneurs who figured out how to conjure up new markets. Teal’s plucky boss Pat Haggerty was a colorful case study of this third step in the innovation process.

The City of México, situated on a lake that had been gradually drying for a thousand years, had begun to experience serious flooding as early as the administration of the first Velasco. The problem was that the Spanish had deforested the ocote- and cypress-covered slopes of the three central lakes, Xaltocán, Texcoco, and Zumpango; now water cascaded off the mountains and soil erosion began to silt up the lakes. The lakes in Anáhuac had never drained to any sea; and during seasons of unusually heavy rains the water level lapping against the capital rose dangerously. After an inundation in the 1550s, the viceroy had rebuilt the old Mexica dikes; by 1604 no dams or levees could hold off the rising water. The second Velasco set the engineer Enrico Martínez to solving the problem. Martínez dug a tunnel four miles through the encircling mountains to drain off the excess water. Many thousands of local indios were dragooned into this task and driven harshly to complete the job within a year. The task was done in eleven months, at an enormous cost in Amerindian hardship and lives. Unfortunately, while the idea was sound, the construction was shaky. The tunnel tended to cave in, and it was not large enough to handle a serious flood. For some twenty years, huge numbers of indios were kept laboring to clear the tunnel and shore it up; then, in 1629, a simultaneous rise in all the lakes choked the tunnel. The destruction was enormous, and some parts of the city remained flooded for four years. The engineer Martínez was again called upon. Now, he converted his disastrous tunnel into an open ditch about thirteen miles long and about two hundred feet deep. This ditch, called the Tajo de Nochistongo, required ten years to put in operation, and work continued on it for more than a century. The draining of the Valley occupied a whole series of viceroys, used up most of their revenues, and laid terrible burdens on the surviving Anáhuac Indians. Nor was the drainage problem really solved, though the Capital was kept out of the mire. Drainage, and the subsequent sinking and shifting of the porous lake-bottom soil is still a monstrous engineering, architectural, and financial problem for México.

The granite complex inside the Great Pyramid, therefore, is poised ready to convert vibrations from the Earth into electricity. What is lacking is a sufficient amount of energy to drive the beams and activate the piezoelectric properties within them. The ancients, though, had anticipated the need for more energy than what would be collected only within the King's Chamber. They had determined that they needed to tap into the vibrations of the Earth over a larger area inside the pyramid and deliver that energy to the power center—the King's Chamber —thereby substantially increasing the amplitude of the oscillations of the granite. Modern concert halls are designed and built to interact with the instruments performing within. They are huge musical instruments in themselves. The Great Pyramid can be seen as a huge musical instrument with each element designed to enhance the performance of the other. While modern research into architectural acoustics might focus predominantly upon minimizing the reverberation effects of sound in enclosed spaces, there is reason to believe that the ancient pyramid builders were attempting to achieve the opposite. The Grand Gallery, which is considered to be an architectural masterpiece, is an enclosed space in which resonators were installed in the slots along the ledge that runs the length of the gallery. As the Earth's vibration flowed through the Great Pyramid, the resonators converted the vibrational energy to airborne sound. By design, the angles and surfaces of the Grand Gallery walls and ceiling caused reflection of the sound, and its focus into the King's Chamber. Although the King's Chamber also was responding to the energy flowing through the pyramid, much of the energy would flow past it. The specific design and utility of the Grand Gallery was to transfer the energy flowing through a large area of the pyramid into the resonant King's Chamber. This sound was then focused into the granite resonating cavity at sufficient amplitude to drive the granite ceiling beams to oscillation. These beams, in turn, compelled the beams above them to resonate in harmonic sympathy. Thus, with the input of sound and the maximization of resonance, the entire granite complex, in effect, became a vibrating mass of energy.

In 1910 Leroux had his greatest literary success with Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (The Phantom of the Opera). This is both a detective story and a dark romantic melodrama and was inspired by Leroux’s passion for and obsession with the Paris Opera House. And there is no mystery as to why he found the building so fascinating because it is one of the architectural wonders of the nineteenth century. The opulent design and the fantastically luxurious furnishings added to its glory, making it the most famous and prestigious opera house in all Europe. The structure comprises seventeen floors, including five deep and vast cellars and sub cellars beneath the building. The size of the Paris Opera House is difficult to conceive. According to an article in Scribner’s Magazine in 1879, just after it first opened to the public, the Opera House contained 2,531 doors with 7,593 keys. There were nine vast reservoirs, with two tanks holding a total of 22,222 gallons of water. At the time there were fourteen furnaces used to provide the heating, and dressing-rooms for five hundred performers. There was a stable for a dozen or so horses which were used in the more ambitious productions. In essence then the Paris Opera House was like a very small magnificent city. During a visit there, Leroux heard the legend of a bizarre figure, thought by many to be a ghost, who had lived secretly in the cavernous labyrinth of the Opera cellars and who, apparently, engineered some terrible accidents within the theatre as though he bore it a tremendous grudge. These stories whetted Leroux’s journalistic appetite. Convinced that there was some truth behind these weird tales, he investigated further and acquired a series of accounts relating to the mysterious ‘ghost’. It was then that he decided to turn these titillating titbits of theatre gossip into a novel. The building is ideal for a dark, fantastic Grand Guignol scenario. It is believed that during the construction of the Opera House it became necessary to pump underground water away from the foundation pit of the building, thus creating a huge subterranean lake which inspired Leroux to use it as one of his settings, the lair, in fact, of the Phantom. With its extraordinary maze-like structure, the various stage devices primed for magical stage effects and that remarkable subterranean lake, the Opera House is not only the ideal backdrop for this romantic fantasy but it also emerges as one of the main characters of this compelling tale. In using the real Opera House as its setting, Leroux was able to enhance the overall sense of realism in his novel.

Ask residents of Manhattan what functions the city provides for them, and they will give you an impressive list. Do this for all the various stakeholders in the city, and you will have a pretty good set of requirements for Manhattan. This would be a useful exercise for city planners or for anyone considering starting a business in the city. In summary, then, the fact that not all systems are requirements-driven does not diminish the value of analyzing requirements. Whether we carry out the analysis before or after the system exists, it still has great benefits.

Which backends of this server are considered “in the critical path,” and why? What aspects of this server could be simplified or automated? Where do you think the first bottleneck is in this architecture? If that bottleneck were to be saturated, what steps could you take to alleviate it?

Bill Campbell developed an excellent methodology for measuring executives in a balanced way that will help you achieve this. He breaks performance down into four distinct areas: 1. Results against objectives Once you’ve set a high standard, it will be straightforward to measure your executive against that standard. 2. Management Even if an executive does a superb job achieving her goals, that doesn’t mean she is building a strong and loyal team. It’s important to understand how well she is managing, even if she is hitting her goals. 3. Innovation It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future. For example, a great way for an engineering manager to hit her goals for features and dates is by building a horrible architecture, which won’t even support the next release. This is why you must look beyond the black-box results and into the sausage factory to see how things get made. 4. Working with peers This may not be intuitive at first, but executives must be effective at communicating, supporting, and getting what they need from the other people on your staff. Evaluate them along this dimension.

Certified Scrum Developers have demonstrated through a combination of formal training and a technical skills assessment that they have a working understanding of Scrum principles and have learned specialized Agile engineering skills. This 3-5 day course provides hands-on instruction in the agile engineering practices. Engineering practices include agile architecture and design, test first approach, paired programming and behavior driven development.

Everyday I became more convinced that good literature has little or nothing to do with trivial fancies such as “inspiration” or “having something to tell” and more with the engineering of language, with the architecture of narrative , with the painting of texture, with the timrbres and colors of the staging. With the cinematography of words, and the music that can be produced by an orchestra of ideas

One way to think of architecture and construction engineering, then, is that they are the arts of battling the downward force to a standstill. We may think of certain feathery skyscrapers as having escaped gravity. They’ve done no such thing—they’ve taken the battle literally to new heights. If you think about it for a little while, you’ll see that the stalemate is only temporary. Building materials corrode, weaken, and decay, while the forces of our natural world are relentless. It’s only a matter of time.

But when the agricultural villages of the Neolithic expanded into larger towns that grew to more than two thousand inhabitants, the capacity of the human brain to know and recognize all of the members of a single community was stretched beyond its natural limits. Nevertheless, the tribal cultures that had evolved during the Upper Paleolithic with the emergence of symbolic communication enabled people who might have been strangers to feel a collective sense of belonging and solidarity. It was the formation of tribes and ethnicities that enabled the strangers of the large Neolithic towns to trust each other and interact comfortably with each other, even if they were not all personally acquainted. The transformation of human society into urban civilizations, however, involved a great fusion of people and societies into groups so large that there was no possibility of having personal relationships with more than a tiny fraction of them. Yet the human capacity for tribal solidarity meant that there was literally no upper limit on the size that a human group could attain. And if we mark the year 3000 BC as the approximate time when all the elements of urban civilization came together to trigger this new transformation, it has taken only five thousand years for all of humanity to be swallowed up by the immense nation-states that have now taken possession of every square inch of the inhabited world. The new urban civilizations produced the study of mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, history, biology, and medicine. They greatly advanced and refined the technologies of metallurgy, masonry, architecture, carpentry, shipbuilding, and weaponry. They invented the art of writing and the practical science of engineering. They developed the modern forms of drama, poetry, music, painting, and sculpture. They built canals, roads, bridges, aqueducts, pyramids, tombs, temples, shrines, castles, and fortresses by the thousands all over the world. They built ocean-going ships that sailed the high seas and eventually circumnavigated the globe. From their cultures emerged the great universal religions of Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Hinduism. And they invented every form of state government and political system we know, from hereditary monarchies to representative democracies. The new urban civilizations turned out to be dynamic engines of innovation, and in the course of just a few thousand years, they freed humanity from the limitations it had inherited from the hunting and gathering cultures of the past.

The success of the scaling-up process depends upon the fact that the conceptual integrity of each piece has been radically improved—that the number of minds determining the design has been divided by seven. So it is possible to put 200 people on a problem and face the problem of coordinating only 20 minds, those of the surgeons. For that coordination problem, however, separate techniques must be used, and these are discussed in succeeding chapters. Let it suffice here to say that the entire system also must have conceptual integrity, and that requires a system architect to design it all, from the top down. To make that job manageable, a sharp distinction must be made between architecture and implementation, and the system architect must confine himself scrupulously to architecture.

Conceptual integrity does require that a system reflect a single philosophy and that the specification as seen by the user flow from a few minds. Because of the real division of labor into architecture, implementation, and realization, however, this does not imply that a system so designed will take longer to build. Experience shows the opposite, that the integral system goes together faster and takes less time to test. In effect, a widespread horizontal division of labor has been sharply reduced by a vertical division of labor, and the result is radically simplified communications and improved conceptual integrity.

For it to be successful, the architect must • remember that the builder has the inventive and creative responsibility for the implementation; so the architect suggests, not dictates; • always be prepared to suggest a way of implementing anything he specifies, and be prepared to accept any other way that meets the objectives as well; • deal quietly and privately in such suggestions; • be ready to forego credit for suggested improvements. Normally the builder will counter by suggesting changes to the architecture. Often he is right—some minor feature may have unexpectedly large costs when the implementation is worked out.

When strategy and culture are efficaciously partnered, an organization can obtain a level of competitive advantage that cannot be copied by competitors. Tools, processes, even methods can be copied, but culture can never be copied. Strategic Excellence is a cultural approach that not only develops what your organization does, but what your organization is and what it is becoming. That’s what makes Strategic Excellence effective. That’s what makes it sustainable." ~ Joshua Plenert & Gerhard Plenert, Strategic Excellence in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Industries

Except for practices that incorporate design as the way they practice—for example, architecture and engineering—the art of design is not incorporated into students’ experiences in schools, despite its superiority in many situations, even to such analytical problem solving as scientists employ. The power of design as an instrument of learning is almost completely overlooked by the educational system. For example, the best way to learn how an automobile (or any other mechanism) works and to gain understanding of why it works the way it does is to design one. Moreover, it is in design that people learn what they want.

The web nearness of your organization assumes a huge part in the accomplishment of your business. These days, business people like to do online research of your organization and study your site completely before contributing or marking any business contract. Business visionaries who are not usual with web extends and don't know how to choose the ideal website architecture organization regularly arrive up picking the wrong one. Benefiting the administrations of a wrong website architecture firm can deliver pulverizing impacts and influence your business unfavorably. In any case, as indicated by website architecture specialists, there are few focuses which ought to be mulled over while choosing the ideal website architecture organization. Such focuses may include: Website architecture Pricing: Decent quality web architecture guarantees fantastic business openings. In the realm of web outlining, a great quality Designer requests a nice cost, while a minimal effort likens to pitiable quality. In any case, few web organizations offer starting quotes and shroud the genuine cost which in the long run heaps up. In few cases, regularly customer’s grumble of working with "Markdown Web Design Companies" which guarantees of a diminished cost however brings about loss of time alongside cash. Subsequently, choice of web organizations on the premise of estimating ought to be deliberately directed. Search engine optimization Services: Such administrations concentrate on enhancing the positioning of your site in different web indexes like Google and Bing. Higher web search tools draw in the natural leads, which are gotten without paying a penny to Google. On the off chance that the viability of SEO is dismissed, even a pulling in and magnificent showcasing system won't have the capacity to draw in guests to your site.

The sheer volume of granite, diorite, and alabaster that was cut precisely into statues around Luxor attests to the ancient Egyptians' mastery of their craft. The Greeks and Romans did not sculpt statues in igneous rock. Granite was not fashioned into statues until the development of more modern power tools with steel bits. In "The Materials of Sculpture", Nicholas Penny writes: "Granite had occasionally been worked in shallow relief, for architectural ornament where it was the local building stone, and for the stiff figures of sixteenth-century cavalries in Brittany, but, before the advent of improved metals and power-driven tools in the nineteenth century, the idea of making statues out of it was seldom seriously entertained by sophisticated sculptors.

…because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

The challenge now is to decode the underlying meaning of small-world and scale-free architecture, if there is any. In one recent attempt, Solé has observed that electronic circuits tend to be wired in a small-world fashion, and he thinks he knows why. Whether he was analyzing the latest digital microchips or the clunky circuits found in old televisions, he found that all the components were just a few electrical steps from one another, yet they were much more clustered than they would have been in an equivalent random circuit, thanks to the modular design favored by engineering practice.

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She wonders what is happening: Too many promises to the market? Bad engineering leadership? Bad product leadership? Too much technical debt? Not enough focus on architectures and platforms that enable developers to be productive?

Resilience versus Robustness. Typically when we want to improve a system’s ability to avoid outages, handle failures gracefully when they occur and recover quickly when they happen, we often talk about resilience. (…) Robustness is the ability of a system that is able to react to expected variations, Resilience is having an organisation capable of adapting to things that have not been thought of, which could very well include creating a culture of experimentation through things like chaos engineering. For example, we are aware a specific machine could die, so we might bring redundancy into our system by load-balancing an instance, that is an example of addressing Robustness. Resiliency is the process of an organisation preparing itself to the fact that it cannot anticipate all potential problems. An important consideration here is that microservices do not necessarily give you robustness for free, rather they open up opportunities to design a system in such a way that it can better tolerate network partitions, service outages, and the like. Just spreading your functionality over multiple separate processed and separate machines does not guarantee improved robustness, quite the contrary, it may just increase your surface area of failure.

anyone who makes decisions about the shape and placement of engineering teams is strongly influencing the software systems architecture.

Now it is true that the physical body of man is composed of the same substances and forces which exist in the wider mineral realm, but the manner in which these substances and forces interact in the human body is the expression of wisdom and perfection in the structure. One will soon convince himself of the truth of this statement if he undertakes to study this structure not merely with the dry intellect but with his whole feeling soul. One can take any part of the human physical body as the subject for this contemplation, for instance the highest part of the upper thigh bone. This is not an amorphous massing of substance, but rather is joined together in the most artful manner, out of diminutive beams which run in different directions. No modern engineering skill could fit a bridge or something similar together with such wisdom. Today such things are still beyond the reach of the most perfect human wisdom. The bone is constructed in this wise fashion so that, through the arrangement of the small beams, the necessary carrying capacity for the support of the human torso can be attained with the least amount of substance. The least amount of matter is used in order to achieve the greatest possible effect in terms of force. In face of such a “masterwork of natural architecture,” one can only become lost in admiration.

SIRISYS is an acronym meaning Semantic Instance Relativity Interface System. His Sirisys platform was engineered to be the "Single Communication Access Port" for individuals to interact with their own "Nexus of Existence." Call her a type of Cybernetic Commutational Array. Her architecture path was to start small, then age into a personalized platform interface symbiot.

Develop spatial skills by modeling your school, house, or neighborhood. Learn engineering and design skills by making structural models of Buckminster Fuller’s tetrahedron-based geodesic domes, Snelson’s tensegrity sculptures, and other architectural forms. Teacher Brenda Jackson particularly recommends the modeling of bridges for its multidisciplinary aspects: “In [a] bridge design project,” she says, “a variety of disciplines is involved. Drawing the proposed design, coping with the practical problem of tension, and using calculations and manual skill in making the model, are all parts of the problem. Testing the bridge to destruction, although somewhat noisy, involves learning in a practical way, and the results are often so spectacular that they are unlikely to be quickly forgotten.

He laid out the defining characteristics, workflow, and management as follows. A two-pizza team will: Be small. No more than ten people. Be autonomous. They should have no need to coordinate with other teams to get their work done. With the new service-based software architecture in place, any team could simply refer to the published application programming interfaces (APIs) for other teams. (More on this new software architecture to follow.) Be evaluated by a well-defined “fitness function.” This is the sum of a weighted series of metrics. Example: a team that is in charge of adding selection in a product category might be evaluated on: a)  how many new distinct items were added for the period (50 percent weighting) b)  how many units of those new distinct items were sold (30 percent weighting) c)  how many page views those distinct items received (20 percent weighting) Be monitored in real time. A team’s real-time score on its fitness function would be displayed on a dashboard next to all the other two-pizza teams’ scores. Be the business owner. The team will own and be responsible for all aspects of its area of focus, including design, technology, and business results. This paradigm shift eliminates the all-too-often heard excuses such as, “We built what the business folks asked us to, they just asked for the wrong product,” or “If the tech team had actually delivered what we asked for and did it on time, we would have hit our numbers.” Be led by a multidisciplined top-flight leader. The leader must have deep technical expertise, know how to hire world-class software engineers and product managers, and possess excellent business judgment. Be self-funding. The team’s work will pay for itself. Be approved in advance by the S-Team. The S-Team must approve the formation of every two-pizza team.

In a 2006 interview by Jim Gray, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels recalled another watershed moment: We went through a period of serious introspection and concluded that a service-oriented architecture would give us the level of isolation that would allow us to build many software components rapidly and independently. By the way, this was way before service-oriented was a buzzword. For us service orientation means encapsulating the data with the business logic that operates on the data, with the only access through a published service interface. No direct database access is allowed from outside the service, and there’s no data sharing among the services.3 That’s a lot to unpack for non–software engineers, but the basic idea is this: If multiple teams have direct access to a shared block of software code or some part of a database, they slow each other down. Whether they’re allowed to change the way the code works, change how the data are organized, or merely build something that uses the shared code or data, everybody is at risk if anybody makes a change. Managing that risk requires a lot of time spent in coordination. The solution is to encapsulate, that is, assign ownership of a given block of code or part of a database to one team. Anyone else who wants something from that walled-off area must make a well-documented service request via an API.

software development is a learning process; working code is a side effect. A software project’s success depends on the effectiveness of knowledge sharing between domain experts and software engineers. We have to understand the problem in order to solve it.

This is the organization responsible for architecture, engineering, quality, site operations, site security, release management, and usually delivery management. This group is responsible for building and running the company's products and services.

Ultimately, therefore, the focus of design around these functions and instruments of digital computation represents a shift in the role and nature of the designer: “the tool user (designer) becomes the new toolmaker (software engineer).

When researchers at the University of North Texas and Yale tried to understand why families gradually increased their fast food consumption, they found a series of cues and rewards that most customers never knew were influencing their behaviors.1.24 They discovered the habit loop. Every McDonald’s, for instance, looks the same—the company deliberately tries to standardize stores’ architecture and what employees say to customers, so everything is a consistent cue to trigger eating routines. The foods at some chains are specifically engineered to deliver immediate rewards—the fries, for instance, are designed to begin disintegrating the moment they hit your tongue, in order to deliver a hit of salt and grease as fast as possible, causing your pleasure centers to light up and your brain to lock in the pattern. All the better for tightening the habit loop.1.25

The design process in engineering is not different in principle from that in architecture, or fashion, or music for that matter. It is a form of composition, of expression, and as such it is open to all the creativity we associate with these.

But if tools were actually central to mental growth beyond purely animal needs, how is it that those primitive peoples, like the Australian Bushmen, who have the most rudimentary technology, nevertheless exhibit elaborate religious ceremonials, an extremely complicated kinship organization, and a complex and differentiated language? Why, further, were highly developed cultures, like those of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Peruvians, still using only the simplest handicraft equipment, though they were capable of constructing superbly planned works of engineering and architecture, like the road to Machu Pichu and Machu Pichu itself? And how is it that the Maya, who had neither machines nor draught animals, were not only great artists but masters of abstruse mathematical calculations.

In the mid-twentieth century it became the fashion in library architecture to design buildings as open-floored structures in which furniture, including bookcases, could be moved about at will. The Green/Snead Library of Congress bookstack that six decades earlier had been declared 'perfect' was now viewed as disadvantageously locking a stack arrangement into the configuration of its construction. In the new approach, reinforced concrete floors carry the loads of bookshelves, so that they can be arranged without regard for window placements. This apparently has the appeal of flexibility in the light of indecision, for planners need not look at the functional and aesthetic requirements of their space and its fittings with any degree of finality; they can always change the use of the space as whim and fashion and consultants dictate. It is unfortunate that such has become the case, for it reflects not only a lack of sensitivity to the historical roots of libraries and their use but also rejects the eminently sensible approach to using natural light as a means of energy conservation if nothing else. There is little more pleasing experience in a library than to stand before a bookshelf illuminated not by florescent lights but by the diffused light of the sun. Direct sunlight can be an annoyance and have a downright blinding effect, of course, but it has been the challenge to architects and engineers since Vitruvius to orient their structures--and the bookshelves in them--to minimize such problems in institutional stacks and in private libraries alike. Let us hope that not all future librarians lose their heliotropic instincts nor lose sight of the bookshelves for the forest of bookcases in which they rest.

Just look at the architecture," Dr Hartmann explained. Blueprint your feet, and you'll find a marvel that engineers have been trying to match for centuries. Your foot's centerpiece is the arch, the greastest weight-bearing design ever created. The beauty of any arch is the way it gets stronger under stress. The harder you push down, the tighter its parts mesh. No stonemason worth his trowel would ever stick a support under an arch; push up from underneath, and you weaken the whole structure. Buttressing the foot's arch from all sides is a high-tensile web of twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, twelve rubbery tendons, and eighteen muscles, all stretching and flexing like an earthquake resistant suspension bridge.

Frank Gehry’s office began to recognize the benefits of CAD/CAM and reciprocated in a technology transfer back to architecture, fusing computers with engineering, fabrication, art and architecture.

Three generations later, viewed from the standpoint of the digital age, a structure such as Hoover can appear to suffer from a kind of vulgarity of size—a thing so enormous and monolithic as to seem preindustrial, almost primitive. Like fascist architecture, that soaring wall of concrete, for all its Art Deco adornments, can strike the postmodern eye as embarrassingly elephantine and childishly simplistic. Yet one only need page through the dam’s elegant blueprints to realize that this is a machine that, in its own way, is as sophisticated as a Boeing 747—a marvel of engineering, of mathematics, of human thinking, of vision, and, yes, of art. For all these reasons, Hoover is regarded by many civil engineers as one of America’s most impressive achievements. It may not be much of an overstatement to say that, along with splitting the atom and sending the Voyager spacecraft beyond the solar system, Hoover is the most remarkable thing this country has ever pulled off. Unlike