Architectural Technology Quotes

A new, self-employed architect scientist is the one in all the world who may accelerate realization of a high-standard survival for all, as now completely practical within the scope of available technology.

Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something that the world didn’t know it was missing.” —PAOLA ANTONELLI, curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art

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.

The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can’t see each other.

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.

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.

It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history. But about the same time there was also created—and this time only in the West—a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton's Principia, published in 1687. Newton's work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals.

Not architecture alone but all technology is, at certain stages, evidence of a collective dream.

The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.

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.

Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.

And yet, unlearn we must, for technology relentlessly transforms the playing field, changing not just the answers but the questions as well.

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.

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach's cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

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 our unconsciousness we take credit where no credit is due, oblivious to the real source of everything we pretend is ours—the sacred origin not just of religion but also of everything else, of science and technology, education and law, of medicine, logic, architecture, ordinary daily life, the cry of longing, the excruciating ache of the awakening love for wisdom.

In pursuing a ‘way,’ Japanese typically move beyond an interest in craftsmanship to a kind of sacred search for the ultimate.

A smart city is an intelligent town that provides enormous possibilities for human growth through art, culture, social, architectural, economic, political, environmental, and scientific flowering with the optimal mix of nature, technology, humanity, and arts.

thinking of software architecture as a standalone concept that can be designed in isolation and then implemented by any group of teams is fundamentally wrong.

In 1966, Derrida delivered a paper entitled “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (which is a wonderful paper, right up there with the original DynamoDB paper and the Page Rank algorithm paper).

Even the God of the Old Testament, faced with the continual querulousness of the tribes of Israel, had occasionally to ignite a piece of desert shrub to awe his audience into reverence. Technology would be the Modernists' burning bush.

Where technology acquisition was once the province of the CIO, today it’s the practitioner leading that process, because by the time a CIO typically hears about a project today, a majority of the technology and architectural decisions have already been made.

Foundational design principles regarding aesthetics, symbolism and meaning of place were for the old-timer carpenter, simply routine. Unfortunately, these principles began to lose their footing in the late 1800s, when building practices shifted toward more commercial technologies.

The externalization of memory [via the use of external symbolic storage systems] has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think, which is changing the role of biological memory, the way in which the human brain deploys its resources, and the form of modern culture.

The first tool of authoritarian regimes is always informational control—both in the gathering of information on the public through surveillance and the filtration of information to the public through owned media. In its early days, the Internet seemed to pose a challenge to authoritarian regimes, but with the advent of social media, we are watching the construction of architectures that fulfill the needs of every authoritarian regime: surveillance and information control. Authoritarian movements are possible only when the general public becomes habituated to—and numbed by—a new normal.

Indeed, the bold, almost primitive, architecture of the CN Tower may reveal a basic truth about Canadian political existence as a perfect ideological symbol of the “technological nationalism” which has always been the essence of the Canadian state, and, most certainly, the locus of the Canadian identity.

Walt Disney often spoke of architecture and technology as functioning in the form of a ‘weenie’ – as something that would beckon the customer to go inside a space or cause the customer to go in a particular direction in a theme park. The weenie acts as a ‘reward. If you have a corridor, at the end there has to be something to justify you going that distance.

Bitcoin represents a fundamental transformation of money. An invention that changes the oldest technology we have in civilization. That changes it radically and disruptively by changing the fundamental architecture into one where every participant is equal. Where transaction has no state or context other than obeying the consensus rules of the network that no one controls. Where your money is yours. You control it absolutely through the application of digital signatures, and no one can censor it, no one can seize it, no one can freeze it. No one can tell you what to do or what not to do with your money. It is a system of money that is simultaneously, absolutely transnational and borderless. We’ve never had a system of money like that.

To avert climate crises, it's important that humanity protects and restores natural carbon sinks, like forests and wetlands. But modern advancements in architecture, materials science, and construction give us the ability to make our modern cities into carbon sinks. We have the technologies, the knowledge, and the capabilities to make cities more valuable to the natural ecosystem than forests are.

When we think of an institution, we can usually see it as embodied in a building: the Vatican, the Pentagon, the Sorbonne, the Treasury, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Kremlin, the Supreme Court. What we cannot see, until we become close students of the institution, are the ways in which power is maintained and transferred behind the walls and beneath the domes, the invisible understandings which guarantee that it shall reside in certain hands but not in others, that information shall be transmitted to this one but not to that one, the hidden collusions and connections with other institutions of which it is supposedly independent. When we think of the institution of motherhood, no symbolic architecture comes to mind, no visible embodiment of authority, power, or of potential or actual violence. Motherhood calls to mind the home, and we like to believe that the home is a private place. Perhaps we imagine row upon row of backyards, behind suburban or tenement houses, in each of which a woman hangs out the wash, or runs to pick up a tear-streaked two-year-old; or thousands of kitchens, in each of which children are being fed and sent off to school. Or we think of the house of our childhood, the woman who mothered us, or of ourselves. We do not think of the laws which determine how we got to these places, the penalties imposed on those of us who have tried to live our lives according to a different plan, the art which depicts us in an unnatural serenity or resignation, the medical establishment which has robbed so many women of the act of giving birth, the experts—almost all male—who have told us how, as mothers, we should behave and feel. We do not think of the Marxist intellectuals arguing as to whether we produce “surplus value” in a day of washing clothes, cooking food, and caring for children, or the psychoanalysts who are certain that the work of motherhood suits us by nature. We do not think of the power stolen from us and the power withheld from us, in the name of the institution of motherhood.

I want to live to get back to my own time. I still hang on to the faint chance that the rainbow will come back for me and take me down the line to tell my tale in what I have already started to think of as the future. I want to make my report. The news I’d like to bring you people up there in the world of the future is that these Ice Age folk don’t see themselves as primitive. They know, they absolutely know, that they’re the crown of creation. They have a language—two of them, in fact—they have history, they have music, they have poetry, they have technology, they have art, they have architecture. They have religion. They have laws. They have a way of life that has worked for thousands of years, that will go on working for thousands more. You may think it’s all grunts and war-clubs back here, but you’re wrong. I can make this world real to you, if I could only get back there to you.

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?

Militant atheists seek to discredit religion based on a highly selective reading of history. There was a time not long ago—just a couple of centuries—when the Western world was saturated by religion. Militant atheists are quick to attribute many of the most unfortunate aspects of history to religion, yet rarely concede the immense debt that civilization owes to various monotheist religions, which created some of the world’s greatest literature, art, and architecture; led the movement to abolish slavery; and fostered the development of science and technology. One should not invalidate these achievements merely because they were developed for religious purposes. If much of science was originally a religious endeavor, does that mean science is not valuable? Is religiously motivated charity not genuine? Is art any less beautiful because it was created to express devotion to God? To regret religion is to regret our civilization and its achievements.

We have to start accounting for the three themes that define women's relationship with that world. The first of these themes is the female body - or, to be precise - its invisibility. Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design - whether medical, technological or architectural - has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. It leads to us injuring ourselves in jobs and cars that weren't designed for our bodies. It leads us to dying from drugs that don't work. It has led to the creation of a world where women just don't fit very well. There is an irony in how the female body is apparently invisible when it comes to collecting data, because when it comes to the second trend that defines women's lives, the visibility of the female body is key. That tend is male sexual violence against women - how we don't measure it, don't design our world to account for it, and in so doing, allow it to limit women's liberty.

Paul Virilio and I, in our different ways, share an intense interest in the changes brought about by technological innovation, by cultural and social upheavals, by natural catastrophes like earthquakes and the social and architectural responses to them. I see these extreme cases as the avant-garde of a coming normality, one that we must engage creatively now, inventing new languages, rules and methods, if we are to preserve what is essential to our humanity, that is, compassion, reason, independence of thought and action.

It may well be that what we have hitherto understood as architecture, and what we are beginning to understand of technology, are incompatible disciplines. The architect who proposes to run with technology knows now that he will be in fast company, and that in order to keep up he may have to discard his whole cultural load, including the professional garments by which he is recognized as an architect. If, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find that a technological culture has decided to go on without him.

And that is why I would propose that, in our teaching of the humanities, we should emphasize the enduring creations of the past. The schools should stay as far from contemporary works as possible. Because of the nature of the communications industry, our students have continuous access to the popular arts of their own times - its music, rhetoric, design, literature, architecture. Their knowledge of the form and content of these arts is by no means satisfactory. But their ignorance of the form and content of the art of the past is cavernous.

The age of centralized, command-and-control, extraction-resource-based energy sources (oil, gas, coal and nuclear) will not end because we run out of petroleum, natural gas, coal, or uranium. It will end because these energy sources, the business models they employ, and the products that sustain them will be disrupted by superior technologies, product architectures, and business models. Compelling new technologies such as solar, wind, electric vehicles, and autonomous (self-driving) cars will disrupt and sweep away the energy industry as we know it.

In the nineteenth century, a young woman named Ellen Richards, trained in chemistry and unable to work in her field, announced the foundation of a new science she called oekology, or the science of living. This was the discipline later called domestic science or home economics, involving the effort to professionalize and dignify the work of the housewife by drawing on science and technology.* A single Greek root, oekos, has wandered through changing conceptions of human living, as well as changing fashions in spelling, producing the contemporary fields of economics and ecology, which frequently seem to be at odds. It also offers the less well-known term ekistics, coined by the city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to refer to a science of human settlement that would include the architectural creation of human spaces, their social and economic integration, and their relationship with the natural environment. Each of these latter-day coinages represents an incomplete view, but together they represent a view that includes biology and architecture, kitchens and stock exchanges, the growth of meadows and children as well as the GNP.

Humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with tedious monotony. “Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age,” he wrote. “But we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.

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.

Movies have more power than any other medium to define the world we believe we live in.  When I was in high school, my classmates said that we didn’t have a “real” high-school experience because it wasn’t like what we saw on TV.  Ironically, reality was less “real” than fiction.  Motion pictures define our cultural consciousness.  I personally can’t imagine how I would process the world if I hadn’t watched movies.  There are certain experiences, like drugs and crime, that we know mostly from movies.  How we imagine the past and the future is largely determined by the films we’ve seen. And in some cases, the futures we’ve seen on screen influence the development of real technology and architecture, so that our fiction sets the course along which our reality will develop. The

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?

His correspondence with Marianne includes a lot of links to news reports. At the moment they’re both engrossed in the Edward Snowden story, Marianne because of her interest in the architecture of global surveillance, and Connell because of the fascinating personal drama. He reads all the speculation online, he watches the blurry footage from Sheremetyevo Airport. He and Marianne can only talk about it over email, using the same communication technologies they now know are under surveillance, and it feels at times like their relationship has been captured in a complex network of state power, that the network is a form of intelligence in itself, containing them both, and containing their feelings for one another. I feel like the NSA agent reading these emails has the wrong impression of us, Marianne wrote once. They probably don’t know about the time you didn’t invite me to the Debs.

Conceive a world-society developed materially far beyond the wildest dreams of America. Unlimited power, derived partly from the artificial disintegration of atoms, partly from the actual annihilation of matter through the union of electrons and protons to form radiation, completely abolished the whole grotesque burden of drudgery which hitherto had seemed the inescapable price of civilization, nay of life itself. The vast economic routine of the world-community was carried on by the mere touching of appropriate buttons. Transport, mining, manufacture, and even agriculture were performed in this manner. And indeed in most cases the systematic co-ordination of these activities was itself the work of self-regulating machinery. Thus, not only was there no longer need for any human beings to spend their lives in unskilled monotonous labour, but further, much that earlier races would have regarded as highly skilled though stereotyped work, was now carried on by machinery. Only the pioneering of industry, the endless exhilarating research, invention, design and reorganization, which is incurred by an ever-changing society, still engaged the minds of men and women. And though this work was of course immense, it could not occupy the whole attention of a great world-community. Thus very much of the energy of the race was free to occupy itself with other no less difficult and exacting matters, or to seek recreation in its many admirable sports and arts. Materially every individual was a multi-millionaire, in that he had at his beck and call a great diversity of powerful mechanisms; but also he was a penniless friar, for he had no vestige of economic control over any other human being. He could fly through the upper air to the ends of the earth in an hour, or hang idle among the clouds all day long. His flying machine was no cumbersome aeroplane, but either a wingless aerial boat, or a mere suit of overalls in which he could disport himself with the freedom of a bird. Not only in the air, but in the sea also, he was free. He could stroll about the ocean bed, or gambol with the deep-sea fishes. And for habitation he could make his home, as he willed, either in a shack in the wilderness or in one of the great pylons which dwarfed the architecture even of the American age. He could possess this huge palace in loneliness and fill it with his possessions, to be automatically cared for without human service; or he could join with others and create a hive of social life. All these amenities he took for granted as the savage takes for granted the air which he breathes. And because they were as universally available as air, no one craved them in excess, and no one grudged another the use of them.

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.

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.

I thought I’d “missed the wave” of some technology or another. What I didn’t appreciate at the time is that new technologies are a lot like buses—one comes every 15 minutes or so. As architects, we have to remember that we cannot stop change, but we can manage it.

I borrow from the world of philosophy, having studied and fallen in love with it in graduate school, and finding its rigors and explosive power very helpful in my 20-year career in tech.

One cannot be successful as an architect without thinking of not only what to do, but how to get it done within an organization, which requires knowing why it should matter to someone who isn’t a technologist.

Overindexing on standardization for its own sake to the detriment of customers is missing the point at best and an abuse of power at worst.

One of my favorite books, and one that changed how I think about software and the evolution of ideas, was A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander (Oxford University Press).

There are two jobs in the world that people want to do the most while knowing the least about: architect and strategist.

Imagine a turkey who is an inductive reasoner. He is fed without fail every morning of his life for years, and reasonably concludes this will continue to the point of never thinking of it, until Thanksgiving morning when his throat is cut.

This manifests in two ways. First, many senior developers start writing the infrastructure that other developers use, rather than using existing (often open source) software. We once worked with a client who had once been on the cutting edge of technology. They built their own application server, web framework in Java, and just about every other bit of infrastructure. At one point, we asked if they had built their own operating system, too, and when they said, “No,” we asked, “Why not?!? You built everything else from scratch!” Upon reflection, the company needed capabilities that weren’t available. However, when open-source tools became available, they already owned their lovingly hand-crafted infrastructure. Rather than cut over to the more standard stack, they opted to keep their own because of minor differences in approach. A decade later, their best developers worked in full-time maintenance mode, fixing their application server, adding features to their web framework, and other mundane chores. Rather than applying innovation on building better applications, they permanently slaved away on plumbing.

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.

Amazon realized the importance of recruiting developers early  —  moving its entire organization to services-based interfaces. At the time, this was revolutionary; while everyone was talking about “Service Oriented Architectures,” almost no one had built one. And certainly no one had built one at Amazon’s scale. While this had benefits for Amazon internally, its practical import was that, if Amazon permitted it, anyone from outside Amazon could interact with its infrastructure as if they were part of the company. Need to provision a server, spin up a database, or accept payments? Outside developers could now do this on Amazon’s infrastructure as easily as employees. Suddenly, external developers could not only extend Amazon’s own business using their services  —  they could build their own businesses on hardware they rented from the one-time bookstore, now a newly minted technology vendor.

The structure of this economy is the reverse of the technological open architecture created by the Internet’s pioneers. Instead, it’s a top-down system that is concentrating wealth instead of spreading it. Unfortunately, the supposed “new rules” for this new economy aren’t very new. Rather than producing more jobs or prosperity, the Internet is dominated by winner-take-all companies like Amazon and Google that are now monopolizing vast swaths of our information economy.

When we have a tightly-coupled architecture, small changes can result in large scale failures. As

the architecture that our services operate within dictates how we test and deploy our code. This

In the technology value stream, we optimize for downstream work centers by designing for operations, where operational non-functional requirements (e.g., architecture, performance, stability, testability, configurability, and security) are prioritized as highly as user features.

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.

SOA and the microservice architecture usually use different technology stacks. SOA applications typically use heavyweight technologies such as SOAP and other WS* standards. They often use an ESB, a smart pipe that contains business and message-processing logic to integrate the services. Applications built using the microservice architecture tend to use lightweight, open source technologies. The services communicate via dumb pipes, such as message brokers or lightweight protocols like REST or gRPC.

The microservice architecture has the following benefits: It enables the continuous delivery and deployment of large, complex applications. Services are small and easily maintained. Services are independently deployable. Services are independently scalable. The microservice architecture enables teams to be autonomous. It allows easy experimenting and adoption of new technologies. It has better fault isolation.

If the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

the history of software development technology is the story of how to conveniently create plugins to establish a scalable and maintainable system architecture.

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The litmus test for the applicability of a fracture plane: Does the resulting architecture support more autonomous teams (less dependent teams) with reduced cognitive load (less disparate responsibilities)?

The architecture of the system gets cemented in the forms of the teams that develop it. —Ruth Malan, “Conway’s Law” In many organizations, there is a variety of team types and there are even teams taking on multiple roles (e.g., an infrastructure and tooling team).

organizing team structures to match the architecture they want the system to exhibit rather than expecting teams to follow a mandated architecture design.

The development of an open format for a whole model is hardly relevant anymore, as long as you are able to move data around.

Architecture has a history of adopting tools that have been developed for other reasons. It’s not a driving force of innovation. It rarely has been.

Buddhism first came to Korea during the fourth century a.d. Virtually from its inception on the peninsula, the religion was a principal force behind social and technological change in Korea. Along with their religion, Buddhist missionaries introduced to Korea a wide cross-section of Sinitic culture and thought, including the Chinese writing system, calendrics, and architecture. Buddhist spiritual technologies were also considered to offer powers far superior to those of the indigenous religion of Shamanism. For all these reasons, Buddhism became an integral part of the religio-political nexus of Korea during the Unified Silla (668-935) and Koryŏ (937-1392) dynasties. Buddhism therefore provided the foundation for Korean national ideology for over a millennium.

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

This new system greatly improved upon the free-for-all it replaced. For the purposes of this book, suffice it to say that implementing this improvement meant replacing Obidos, acb, and many other key pieces of our software infrastructure piece by piece while it was still running our business nonstop. This required a major investment in development resources, systems architecture planning, and great care to ensure that the monolith continued to stand until its last surviving function had been replaced by a service. The rolling regeneration of the way we built and deployed technology was a bold move, an expensive investment that stretched over several years of intensive and delicate work.

We took everything we’d learned about the industry and Nest’s potential customers, about demographics and psychographics, and we created two distinct personas. One was a woman and the other a man. The man was into technology, loved his iPhone, was always looking for cool new gadgets. The woman was the decider—she dictated what made it into the house and what got returned. She loved beautiful things, too, but was skeptical of super-new, untested technology. We gave them names and faces. We made a mood board of their home, their kids, their interests, their jobs. We knew what brands they loved and what drove them crazy about their house and how much money they spent on heating bills in the winter. We needed to look through their eyes to understand why the man might pick up the box. And so we could convince the woman to keep it. Over time we added more personas—couples, families, roommates—as we better understood our customers. But in the beginning we started with two—two human beings who everyone could imagine, whose photos they could touch. That’s how prototyping works. It’s how you make abstract concepts into physical representations. You turn your messaging architecture into words and pictures on a box. [See also: Figure 5.4.1, in Chapter 5.4.] You turn “someone in a store” into Beth from Pennsylvania. And then you keep going. Every step of the way, along every link of the chain.

the architecture of the system and the architecture of the organization are at odds, the architecture of the organization wins.

Conway’s law tells us that we need to understand what software architecture is needed before we organize our teams, otherwise the communication paths and incentives in the organization will end up dictating the software architecture.

in the words of Ruth Malan: “if we have managers deciding . . . which services will be built, by which teams, we implicitly have managers deciding on the system architecture.”11

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.

Intel squandered its lead, missing major shifts in semiconductor architecture needed for artificial intelligence, then bungling its manufacturing processes and failing to keep up with Moore’s Law.

Node.js is a powerful, open-source, server-side JavaScript runtime environment that enables developers to build scalable and high-performance applications. Leveraging event-driven architecture and non-blocking I/O operations, Node.js allows for efficient handling of concurrent requests, making it ideal for building real-time web applications, APIs, and microservices. With its extensive ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, Node.js empowers developers to create fast, lightweight, and modern applications across various domains.

Despite the relentless effort to remove coordination and synchronization in core technologies, we have, for the most part, neglected organizational and architectural coordination. As a result, no matter how fast our computer systems run, achieving outcomes have fallen behind coordinating activities of teams and humans.

Neo-classicism, not just in architecture and urban planning but also in remaking archaeological sites and shaping culture in general, became the colonial technology which was transplanted from Munich, Berlin, and Paris,36 a technology that merged monumentalization with capitalist modernization.

The payments system is the heart of the financial services industry, and most people who work in banking are engaged in servicing payments. But this activity commands both low priority and low prestige within the industry. Competition between firms generally promotes innovation and change, but a bank can gain very little competitive advantage by improving its payment systems, since the customer experience is the result more of the efficiency of the system as a whole than of the efficiency of any individual bank. Incentives to speed payments are weak. Incrementally developed over several decades, the internal systems of most banks creak: it is easier, and implies less chance of short-term disruption, to add bits to what already exists than to engage in basic redesign. The interests of the leaders of the industry have been elsewhere, and banks have tended to see new technology as a means of reducing costs rather than as an opportunity to serve consumer needs more effectively. Although the USA is a global centre for financial innovation in wholesale financial markets, it is a laggard in innovation in retail banking, and while Britain scores higher, it does not score much higher. Martin Taylor, former chief executive of Barclays (who resigned in 1998, when he could not stop the rise of the trading culture at the bank), described the state of payment systems in this way: ‘the systems architecture at the typical big bank, especially if it has grown through merger and acquisition, has departed from the Palladian villa envisaged by its original designers and morphed into a gothic house of horrors, full of turrets, broken glass and uneven paving.

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).

In technology, as in writing or speech-or haute cuisine-there are varying degrees of fluency, of articulateness, of self-expression. A beginning practitioner in architecture, like a beginner at a foreign language, will use the same base combinations-the same phrases-over and over, even if not quite appropriate. A practiced architect, steeped in the art of the domain, will have discarded any notion of the grammar as pure rules, and will use instead an intuitive knowledge of what fits together. And a true master will push the envelope, will write poetry in the domain, will leave his or her "signature" in the habit-combinations used.

because he knew that he was coming for the last time. That morning he had been expelled from the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology.

Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance? 113. There is also the fact that people no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities. There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere. This is not to reject the possibilities which technology continues to offer us. But humanity has changed profoundly, and the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality which pulls us in one direction. It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything.

New technologies are hailed for enabling us to “organize without organizations,” which are condemned as rigid and suffocating and antithetical to the open architecture of the Internet.

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.

Rather than be characterized as a technocratic burden to be satisfied, energy can, and should, help architecture finally and powerfully fulfill the terms of its ambitions: form, space, technology, program, and urbanism.

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.

A technology architecture expresses fundamental and foundational aspects of physical design for some piece of technology.

how we organize our teams has a powerful effect on the software we produce, as well as our resulting architectural and production outcomes. In

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.

Generating a system architecture is not a deterministic process. It requires careful consideration of business requirements, technology choices, existing infrastructure and systems, and actual physical resources, such as budget and manpower.

They are the ones who first appreciate the architecture of your product and why it therefore has a competitive advantage over the current crop of products established in the marketplace. They are the ones who will spend hours trying to get products to work that, in all conscience, never should have been shipped in the first place. They will forgive ghastly documentation, horrendously slow performance, ludicrous omissions in functionality, and bizarrely obtuse methods of invoking some needed function—all in the name of moving technology forward. They

This kind of service-oriented architecture allows small teams to work on smaller and simpler units of development that each team can deploy independently, quickly, and safely. Shoup notes, “Organizations with these types of architectures, such as Google and Amazon, show how it can impact organizational structures, [creating] flexibility and scalability. These are both organizations with tens of thousands of developers, where small teams can still be incredibly productive.

When Mathematics unfold through Origamis, when video games target Medicine and Education, when architecture embraces nature, when we defy gravity, when physics dance, and dance clubs play Einstein, when we stop playing war, when TV starts saying something, when we produce without wasting, when engineering meets humanity’s primary needs, when all of these are not just casualties, but a standard we all live UP to: Then we’ll know. I’ll know: we really live in the 21st century