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BuildingArchitecture

The kind of architecture involved in erecting buildings.

I loved the following list of "103 things architects do", due to the Royal Institute of British Architects, "one of the most influential architectural institutions in the world" : http://www.architecture.com/.

A few interesting quotes from another page on the same site : "Clients have too often been disappointed by the results of the way promising designs have been delivered as buildings - too often over budget, late, and with too many defects. [...] Design quality is now very much on the agenda of the Movement for Innovation and other associated bodies, thanks, in no small measures, to the part played by architects who have joined in the rethinking. At the same time Sustainability and 'Respect for People' are being accorded especially high priority. [...] The intellectual underpinning of Rethinking Construction is the philosophy of Lean Thinking."

LaurentBossavit 2002.08.11

I often ponder the relationship of building architecture to software architecture. Your thoughts above draw direct ties for me from building architecture to software. I just returned from touring the Winchester House which I think is a strong allegory for many computer systems. It started as an eight room farm house and ended up in a weird suspended animation of something like 150 rooms - arranged in a hodge-podge fashion with stairways, doors and windows leading to nowhere. And, the 8 room farmhouse was re-designed something like 600 times from 1884 to 1922. Mrs. Winchester, who owned the house and personally oversaw the building, used superstition to direct most of the building. Perhaps not unlike much of software development.

That being said, I do not always agree with the direct connection that is sometimes drawn between building architecture and software architecture. I believe, in building buildings, that there are more tangible constraints that can direct the architect. In software, we find fewer constraints and more choices - many of them bad. In software, much of what we do is search for things that will help us constrain the search domain in which we hope to find a solution. Building architects can start later in this process because their search domain is already constrained. -- BobKing 2002.08.10

I love the Winchester story. Often I find that people who draw a parallel with building architecture also believe that construction is a more mature, more "scientific" discipline than software development.

Of late I have become quite leery of "essence-seeking" definitions. My official title has been for two consecutive jobs, "Architect" - not even "Software Architect", mind you, such is the arrogance of our profession. I have the feeling that this could make a brick and mortar Architect, who's gone to all the trouble of getting a degree and all, rather unhappy; I got my highest degree at age 18, and only went through three years of formal education beyond that.

And I certainly don't claim I can answer the question "what is architecture" or "what is an architect" - though I will occasionally offer answers, because doing so is a popular parlor game among software people.

What I do is look at what people do who call themselves "architects" - both in software and in construction - and what other people expect of the people who call themselves architects. I try to draw useful conclusions from that, but the field is so diverse, and my experience of it so limited - I would probably drop the title altogether, if it weren't that one common expectation on the part of employers is that an architect is paid more than "just a developer".

One definition of architect that has been most useful to me is one I found in the first AYE book, at the end of a piece titled "Life as a software architect".

LaurentBossavit 2002.08.12

As you've noticed, by (at least) his essay in the book, Bob is our resident articulate (and enthusiastic) architect... and rightly so.

I find it interesting how we see praise for the work of Christopher Alexander (Pattern Language and earlier books) and then a reticence to associate our design with physical structures. Certainly residences are often very different than our systems. At the risk of being labeled ancient, I have always been impressed by Barry Boehm's studies which seemed to reveal a cost to repair errors that closely correlated to hardware. Hardware engineers I have talked with over the past 15 years confirm these numbers. Which has me wondering: maybe we aren't so different.

I like Bob's story of the visit to the Winchester house and it's relevance. I for one, think that design is design is design. All architecture has a lesson to teach us. We just have to understand how the constraints and opportunities map to our own work. Of course a residence may not be like a complex software system, but maybe building a skyscraper in Chicago or New York is. There was a show called Skyscraper on TV ... maybe on PBS maybe Discovery, who can keep track. But the show was a fantastic retrospective of the planning, design and scheduling challenges faced by the team building the skyscraper.

In Phoenix we have the delightful opportunity to visit Taliesin West, one of Frank Lloyd Wright's residence/ training communities. Perhaps his methods in that effort relate more to XP. Although I suspect a story of Lloyd building the Guggenheim in NYC employed quite different methods. His "organic architecture" is an inspiration to all working on the requirements and architecture side of software.

- BeckyWinant 2002.08.15

BTW, one of the more fascinating things about Frank Lloyd Wright is that he thought allowing for people over some heigth (about 5'10"?) was a waste. After trying on sofas all day, I can tell you that most furniture manufacturers think that people under 5'4" and over 5'10" don't exist. I wonder how many people at AYE actually are between those two heights? I'm betting less than 50%. Amazing how "average" leads to unusable requirements by a substantial number of potential users. A lesson for us in software, too. -- JohannaRothman 2002.08.17

On the software analogy, I guess that commercial software has to worry more about averages, and internal IT has to worry more about specifics.

Hopefully you and Mark found something "just right", like Goldilocks.

- BeckyWinant 2002.08.17

Laurent's comment about "Architect" as opposed to "Software Architect" got me thinking. See DelusionalTitles DonGray 2002.08.17