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Comment by twelvechairs | Hacker News Reader

My old boss said buildings are like baking. We need 95% bread and 5% cake. Problem with architects is they want to make cake almost every time.

I really think we are heading in the right direction with this stuff though. There are more and more good contextual buildings and we are refining our ideas on good design as a society. It is a very different world to most of the 20th C when building technologies, city functions and society at large were advancing so fast it was hard to understand what to aim for.

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The main problem with architecture metaphors for software is that software people think buildings and other construction projects are far, far, far more static than they actually are, so software people think they have a unique problem.

As an example, someone saying "but you don't change buildings|bridges|towers|dams|... once they're built" is almost inevitable when you start comparing the discipline of architecture and infrastructure to software.

> "but you don't change buildings|bridges|towers|dams|... once they're built"

Anyone who's played Factorio for any (un)reasonable length of time knows the folly of this assumption. At best, a player did a lot of planning to avoid this specific problem.

Not to criticise parent, but I think the building and construction metaphor doesn't apply to software. The construction happens in the compiler and the interpreter, it's a afterthought, you get it for free. What we do is design, sometimes iterative design. Need a different metaphor.

We needed 95% bread in the 20th century. As society evolves and income rises, we want to consume better quality food. Not cake, though.

I think it's the same with architecture.

For example: artificial lighting at night can be detrimental to human sleep.

How come our houses aren't thought to account for that? We should have dimm yellow lighting below the eyes to avoid messing up with melatonin, for instance.

Hummus. The futures market is in Hummus.

Buildings have purposes and limitations. They can fail by not accomplishing their purpose sufficiently or by being limited in a way that defeats their purpose.

Limitations are economic, legal, or physical. Two of those can be bent or changed.

You can work around many problems with enough effort and money. For example, if you have a bedroom, you can buy lightproof curtains to block the windows (but this impedes airflow). You can turn off overhead lights and buy lights that go in the places and colors that you want. These are relatively easy and cheap compared to rebuilding.

We're discussing architecture, which comes before building.

Most architects are concerned with the basics, which you mentioned. This is the bread.

What I'm saying is: society is evolving and an increasing portion of the population, especially in rich countries, would appreciate architectures that go beyond that to consider the quality of life in more refined and well-thought ways.

Without opening the can-of-worms that is anticontextual architecture, you never have the budget to make cake. I had 1 building in 10+ years - and it was a pool house, an ancillary structure.

To reinforce that notion, bread is not usually flat on top but cake almost always is.

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