

A house designed like a web application - jgrodziski
http://davidgalbraith.org/essay/use-case-study-house-1-a-house-designed-like-a-web-application/2723/

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PedroCandeias
Here in southwestern Europe most people live in apartment buildings. Their
design is usually guided by cost concerns, developed and approved by people
who never set foot in them. As a result, most of us end up living in
apartments which don't really work. Mine has a niche for the washing machine
but nowhere to dry the laundry, for instance.

Reading the op's post, I wonder if there's room (excuse the pun) for hackers
to disrupt the house construction market with affordable, highly functional
units that make their tenants' lives better in a much more tangible way than
another photo sharing app.

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pavel_lishin
> Mine has a niche for the washing machine but nowhere to dry the laundry, for
> instance.

Are you sure it's not meant for one of these? <http://i.imgur.com/e4sMH.jpg>

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camtarn
Feels like it needs a conclusion - if the method of designing websites doesn't
work well for architecture, then what happens when you try and design a house
like a website: what works surprisingly well, what leads to a less-than-
optimal house or one that just feels wrong, etc? Does this demonstrate the
author's original theory of the architecture flow of work being better, or
does the beautiful house designed at the end of the article suggest that
different workflows can still lead to a good product?

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MCompeau
A diagram demonstrating a series of functional/spatial relationships is the
most distant thing from design in architecture. Although the relationships are
important and may need to be maintained for the project, they rarely map
literally into the projects actual physical embodiment.

Architecture is an utterly holistic process that unifies physical structure,
conceptual structure, aesthetics, finishes, functional programming (space
planning), user experience into a physical entity that can be deciphered by
its users. Designing a house "like a web application" addresses only one tiny
part of this process. Maybe the author intended this as a critique of the
process of designing a web app (I'm not sure, his conclusion was very brief)
being too limited in its scope.

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tintin
Reminds me of Christopher Alexander's book 'A Pattern Language' where he
explains exactly this.

I even think the programmers of 'The Sims' and others used it. Sometimes it's
also called Object-Oriented Design.

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brudgers
How is this better than standard architectural programming techniques?

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skrebbel
Cool living room!

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kenrik
Hah, I don't know if eat/play really belongs in the hub. I have little time
for either, maybe i'm doing it all wrong?

Lol.

