Describing the (explicitly Western) architectural production of the last five hundred years, Mario Carpo writes how this output of forms, spaces, and bodies of knowledge was resolutely and irreversibly conditioned by the “Gutenberg Galaxy”, that is, the invention of the printing press and the index of mechanical matrices it inhered. The resultant “typographic architecture”, the buildings and urban forms that we live with to this day, corresponds in content to a print culture that is rapidly passing into extinction, threatening to bring down with it the Western architectural cannon it has sustained for so long a time. According to Carpo’s premonitory argument, this eventuality will cause a social rift so decisive to assure the virtual destruction of these building traditions, despite the desperate attempts of preservationists and reformists alike.

The invocation of Carpo’s work is to contextualize this installation by Korean artist Hong Seon Jang, who has fashioned an entire micro metropolis out of decommissioned movable type. Where the aforementioned argument logically relates the disappearance of familiar Western architectural forms with the removal of its substructure, Jang’s “Type City” does the opposite. Using lead type salvaged from an antiquated technology–an old printing press–the artist builds an entirely new, if not spatially novel urban network of towers, housing, and infrastructure. Jang’s choice of material is anything but unintentional, loaded with historical and material implications that speak to our collective nascent post-print mentality that promises to reenvision our homes, landscapes, and cities.

RedBeanPHP is an easy to use ORM (Object relational mapping) library for PHP. RedBeanPHP automatically creates tables, indexes, columns and foreign keys for you. You can just start programming and RedBeanPHP will create all database structures for you on-the-fly as you go. The resulting database will be perfectlty readable and queryable.

Specifically, I'm wondering where they got their inventory from at the beginning.
Did they buy from a local store and just pack/ship it out themselves?
Or did they negotiate with the manufacturers at the start? If this, then how did they convince the manufacturer to work with them when they had zero customers and thus no purchasing power to entice the manufacturers?

Visual Effects Company

Amongst the most critically acclaimed offices of the last two decades, OMA has consistently produced innovate architectural ideas, methods, and as we will see below, organizational models. This much is undeniable. The question at hand is whether the almost contagious ability of OMA to replicate itself in the habits of other offices is the result of duplication by admiration, a legitimate response to the challenges of globalized architecture practice which OMA may have pioneered, or the charismatic quirk of OMA’s success overshadowing other possibilities...

[This post is] largely a mythology of the habits of organization, production, and decision making that one office has pursued, written from the outside, aided by accumulated anecdotes. If the OMA style of working has become a popular drug, this is an attempt to figure out what we’re all taking, why, and what other options may exist...

Decades after Alan Turing and others who made Bletchley Park a famous mansion of mathematics, the same methods were being put to in another industry altogether.

Through the unlikely combination of innovations in drawing and model making techniques, combined with a new theoretical understanding of architecture, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) rewired their office of the late 1990s into a brute force computational device whose efficiency would become wildly contagious.

OMA has been one of the most consistently interesting offices during the past couple decades but we’re more concerned with the how than the what....

Architecture can be a hard thing to discuss because it’s an art of integration. The difficulty of separating the overall design task into smaller units of work is at least part of the reason that the stereotype of the architect is one of obsessive detail-oriented control, the Maestro, the creative genius... The factors that go into an architectural proposition run the gamut from calculable aspects such as structural performance under gravity loads, financial constraints under a given budget, and the practical realities of human ergonomics as much as they rely on the cultural and symbolic meaning of forms and materials, or even the individual whims of the client. Looking at any of these elements in isolation leads to woe, yet integrating all of them all of the time leads to paralysis... OMA’s invention was to turn lead designers into grand editors. For an office who had global aspirations and highly mobile directors, a more efficient way of working was needed that would allow idea generation phases to happen without extensive indoctrination of young designers to the office’s philosophy and stylistic interests, and without constant supervision of the frenetic leaders. Diversity within any design cycle would be maximized and the ‘time cost’ of decision making would be lowered... Koolhaas describes buildings as related collections of ideas rather than integrated wholes. If previously a building’s outside and inside were meant to add up to one coherent thing, in Koolhaas’ logic they are free to be separate, each with their own logics. This essential cleavage was levied against all aspects of the building. The old model of seeing a building as one integrated design task was now shattered into a family of many individual tasks... Koolhaas’ writing made it OK for designers—especially those in his office—to treat the design of a building as many separate, smaller design tasks and the outcome of each did not necessarily need to bear clear resemblance to the others. On the contrary, buildings that displayed multiple ideas, forms, and materials became central to the aesthetic of OMA. Koolhaas’ radically dis-integrated approach to architecture relieved junior designers from having to understand the full nuance of the overall project and freed the lead designer from the burden of providing constant ongoing feedback to keep their team on track with the big picture. Instead, feedback need be applied only at specific points (such as internal reviews) where a range of options are evaluated for their intrinsic value more than than their appropriateness to an external, overriding logic. In this operational model the lead designer need not play the role of Maestro. Rather, they initiate the design process with a provocation and continually curate the results. It’s more like editing a live broadcast than it is painting an image... The phases of production and evaluation were allowed to become distinct and extreme. Production phases could involve maximum divergence, and evaluations could be viciously binary. Here we find the basic mechanism of brute force hacking: find success by exhausting failure...

OMA is famous for its use of blue foam as a model making material, a technique that uses polystyrene foam cut into desired shapes with a heated wire. Whereas working with cardboard requires planning ahead and some translation of ideas into a workflow of making, with foam the workflow and ideas are collapsed into one. Making is thinking... Working with foam instead of more traditional materials allowed the design teams at OMA to model their ideas quicker, which in turn allowed more ideas to be considered in the same span of time. The adoption of this new technique was akin to upgrading the processor speed of the office... The time required for each cycle of development is reduced as much as possible such that a maximum number of iterations are seen, tested, and discarded on the way to finalizing a design proposal.

What blue foam did for model making, the diagram did for drawings. Traditional architectural drawings are laden with detail whereas the diagram is all punch...

This is the essence of brute force architecture. To test and discard as many ideas, produced as quickly as possible, is a luxury that is only afforded to an office that has a theoretical framework allowing design tasks to be simplified and separated, the right tools to do so, and a large pool of able and willing hands to put those tools in motion...

Like Turing 60 years prior, OMA’s operations are based on brute forcing through the search space. Whereas Turing relied on something that would later come to be known as computing power, OMA relies on employees who willfully work long hours to be part of the magical machine... The simplification of the way in which ideas were presented through models and diagrams smoothed over the difficulties of running an office with many different mother tongues by giving preference to image over language, in effect turning a potential hurdle into a mechanism to bolster the brute force production system... the specific tactics of OMA are contagious: sections with oversized text stuffed into different programmatic zones, barcode diagrams, unrolled plans, renderings collaged with glib inhabitants, etc. The pervasiveness of OMA’s habits in other offices are so extreme that one is tempted to ask whether this way of working is a logical outcome of globalized practice, but the dearth of competing operational models hints that perhaps this is not the case...

When thinking about the future of practice after Brute Force, one wonders what models we may employ to develop not only the next generation of architectural ideas, but the next generation of architectural offices as well. How does an office represent ideas to itself?... How do offices effectively divide tasks? How do they honor a commitment to both community and client? How do they contribute both hard and soft value to the world?

"the general mental model of the network as such was something like “very many point-to-point connections”. In one way that is absolutely correct, the physical network infrastructure is a lot of cables connecting everything. But then most people don’t differentiate between what a network is (physically) and the mental model for how the networked objects works, which means that we tacitly understand the ”network-ness” of products and services in terms of serial point-to-point."

"As we steer toward a future in which all our objects and environments are connected, we will eventually find ourselves living a technologist’s dream, with everything being part of the network. But how will people experience and interact with this?"

"The network is part of our everyday lives. Seeing the network is the first step to understanding the network, acting on it, and gaining an everyday literacy in it. So what should it look like? These video sketches are part of our ongoing effort to find out"

We're being tricked. We need to trick back.

The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (CITE) will be the first of its kind, in scale and scope, fully integrated test, evaluation and certification facility dedicated to enabling and facilitating the commercialization of new and emerging technologies....

CITE will represent a 20th century American city with a population of approximately 35,000 people and be built on roughly 15 square acres. CITE’s test city will be unpopulated. This unique feature will allow for a true laboratory without the complication and safety issues associated with residents.

CITE will be a catalyst for the acceleration of research into applied, market-ready products by providing “end to end” testing and evaluation of emerging technologies and innovations from the world’s public laboratories, universities and the private sector.

CITE will be modeled after a mid-sized modern American city, integrating real-world urban and suburban environments along with all the typical working infrastructure elements that make up today’s cities. This will provide customers the unique opportunity to test and evaluate technologies in conditions that most closely simulate real-world applications.

Access a premier knowledge base of actionable management models to:

Locate the best approach for your assignment
Learn from respected management thinkers
Discover the best research from business schools
Share your business experience with others
Download ready-to-go PowerPoint templates
Sign up for a free membership now