Thursday, 25 April 2013

Ätzende Architekturmetaphern

On JAX 2013 I gave a talk "Ätzende Architekturmetaphern". The main thesis was that software architecture has arrived at a point very similar to one in the history of urbanism, where two main streams merged. The one coming from the tradition of society, the "organic" one. The other coming from the machine age and functionalism, the "mechanical one". Via a short detour over emergence, a new kind of theory materialized - what Vidler called "the third typology". It lead to a new approach of "bottom-up" research, cumulating in the analysis of informal architectures, i.e. slums. This new way of critical theory could very well apply to the current state of our profession, where we are looking for a way to include resilience, rhizomatic structures, information flows, evolutionary design and agility into our architecture.



As Prezi does not feature longer transcripts, this is the reading list (received on April 25th 2013):





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Sunday, 31 March 2013

Functional architecture


An addition to „Alphabet and Algorithm“: Mario Carpo goes on, telling how Giedion looked at repetitive tasks (and eventually the Japanese tea ceremony) as a precursor for our technology. In “Rethinking technology” I have once read the marvelous story of Oliver Evans and his magic machines. It reminded me a lot of the autocracy in “Walden” or “Just enough architecture”. Giedion was one of the ideologists behind CIAM, postulating separated districts and as means to achieve at a new architecture of “human scale”, a new humanism through the “functional city”. This made me think on Japanese cities and its structures that emerge out of simple rules, almost like A New Kind Of Science. If we could establish as simple rules and boundaries we could govern systems as efficient and elegant. Creating a functional architecture that actually matches organizational systems. If this would be possible we might eventually forget about technology.

Looking forward to read “Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics” which I found researching for some keywords. It connects Giedion’s work to the Cyborg Manifesto – something I have become curious about again after watching “Real Humans”.
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Saturday, 23 March 2013

Architecture after art


In his “six memos for the next millennium”, Calvino quotes an introduction to the Chomsky/Piaget debate which lists two metaphors for the emergent development of life forms: The crystal, representing invariance, and the flame, representing stability in motion. The two, he claims, converge in the metaphor of the city: “The invisible cities … a singular symbol concentrating all my reflections, experiences and hypotheses”.
Ersilia, the most cited invisible city, standing for internet relations. (C)   Delavega, Ephemera + Lascarr


I am a huge fan of using urbanism as a model for software systems. The examples of using houses to illustrate relationships between components are just too static, representing at best the crystal. Often, leaky abstractions are drawn (like decorators to ornaments), adding no real value to the discussion.

One could argue that even the metaphor of a city is incorrect and we should rather rely on pure emergence within benevolent dictatorship. In my opinion this would just be the flame* (Not Nero’s hopefully). Viktor uses the Bonsai as a model for software architecture. Small decisions lead to a final picture – what Smolander calls the decision process in his four disciplines of architecture (the others being the blueprint, the literature and the language). I’d like to be free in the decisions, like the flame, but limited in its dimensions, like the crystal. What I like about the Bonsai model though, its reference to Ikebana, in Garr Reynolds words: “Empty space is as important as the positive elements […] Space allows other elements to […] connect”. Japanese cities are built differently from European ones. More central planning is applied, districts are clearly separated, but on the other hand the city is built in harmony with nature. Tatami mats are the traditionally used not only to cover Japanese floors but to actually define the floor plan. Japanese cities are complex patterns, defined by simple rules for spaces and floor plans. Applied to large software systems this would mean we take into consideration environmental qualities and turn them into simple rules, like Haiku poetry. Or, as Calvino says “Poetry is the great enemy of chance”.

Recently at the Prado it was fascinating to see how the style, e.g. of Tizian, of paintings was preceded by renaissance architecture. The other day it struck me in an exhibition on Paul Klee’s influence on Japanese architecture. Buildings like the Sendai Mediatheque reference his paintings in their dynamic structure – both the flame and the crystal. There is no reason why architecture cannot come out of art, it does not always have to be the other way around.

*) Interestingly, the Netherlands are very well known for planning cities top-down. In this context of the blog post it would make perfect sense to discard the metaphor.
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Wednesday, 27 February 2013

An architecture of predators and monuments

Mario Carpo’s, in his essay “Alphabet and Algorithm”, tells the story how Alberti invented the modern architect. He managed to invent plans which allowed the architect to stay away from the actual work, concentrate on the plan, yet keep all the fame. All of this in the best intention to foster collaboration and nurture the crafts. Many software (and particularly enterprise) architects see themselves in this tradition - unfortunately only the planning part. But Carpo goes on and explains how modern algorithms sorta turned the Renaissance around, bringing back participatory authorship into real-world architecture. While identity and idiosyncrasy become less important, the remix, versatility and sustainability in terms of longevity come back to architecture.

The rupture of individualism in architecture can be linked to the megastructure movements of the late 60ies. As Annette Urban points out in “Mythos Monument”, the very concepts which wanted to turn cities into moveable, flexible, flowing structures became the megastructures par excellance. By neglecting centralization, the city planners effectively turned themselves and their structures into the center. When Haussmann tore apart the arrondissements of Paris to allow industrialization and military vantage, rather than introducing the “service bus”, he froze the versatility. In realization that any structure is totalitarian or at least aristocracy, and thus can never provide actual needs for citizens, Architects like Superstudio began ironically playing with monuments and city limits. From them we learn that planning always ends in itself.


Courtesy: Archivio Superstudio, Firenze via Megastructure Reloaded

However, this reminds me of a story from Emergence. When W. Daniel Hillis's self-emerging AI algorithms showed signs of perfect structures, but less-than-optimal local maxima, he introduced predators. By doing so, he encouraged the algorithms to develop in the right direction, becoming stronger, and eventually near-optimal. The lesson for architects is: Become a predator, one that collaborates just like Alberti did.
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Sunday, 20 January 2013

Resilience, responsive design and vertical integration

Jason Grigsby had an excellent post recently on responsive design for mobile apps. In short he says that one always need to design in a responsive way, because the lines between screen sizes, input models and form factors are so blurry that, in fact, it's impossible to know how the user expects your app to work.

I like to put this in context with mixed model mobile apps (Frameworks like Calatrava) and the new trend infrastructure trend of "vertical integration", i.e. expand cell architectures into the hardware domain.

BlackBerry 10 is a new type of platform which is streamlined (managing user experience) and open at the same time. It allows polyglot programming, hence not only mixed model apps but a cross-tier, cross-device integration of components. You could have a database model in Java, covering almost all platforms. A UI which is responsivly designed for each platform, and business logic which is in a DSL. The latter is most imporant because, with vertical integration, it could be aware of the consistency models offered by the backend. Independent of data storage, the business layer could offer several consistency models. If one or the other model is favoured, only this kind of hardware could be scaled. Just like with Facebook's photo storage, all parameters can be negotiated by both server and client. Which will eventually lead to emergent and resilient systems which will be able to run for longer than most platforms.

These cross-device, cross-tier software systems work like swars. The benevolent dictator nudges the swarm, bringing in new systems, monitoring both user experience and infrastructure efficiency. Now the question would be - how to control? Agile software development aims toward one product, this is clearly not  enough. So how would be build, distribute and manage these kind of systems? How would we manage the API's to connect them, the directories to find the services and the resilience to learn from our mistakes?
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