Re: Engineering rules of thumb and Amazon's HQ2 effort
Gregory Alan Bolcer <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare |
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My "award winning" office building at UCI for a lot of years was disposable. They built it and then tore it down not soon after. Greg http://www.ocregister.com/2007/01/23/gehry-building-at-uci-razed/ University officials contend that the Gehry building was not intended as a long-term, permanent structure, and that it was falling apart and needed major, costly renovations. The building helped bring UCI to national prominence in architectural circles. Time magazine featured it prominently in a profile on Gehry, and called it “improbably beautiful.” On 9/11/2017 7:02 PM, Ken Meltsner wrote: > Are our tech giants getting a bad case of edifice complex? First > Apple with the "spaceship" HQ, and now Amazon putting out an RFP for > their second headquarters. > > Last week, sdw mentioned one of the most famous engineering "laws" > (Postel's). Well, way back at my first professional, permanent job > (GE R&D), Stephen Spacil, one of my colleagues, had come up with an > engineering "law" that ought to be better known: > > By the time you build a new facility for an opportunity, the > opportunity will have passed. > > There were many examples at GE in Niskayuna, like the coal > gasification building that wasn't completed until coal gasification > was shown to be a dead end both economically and technically, or the > lab space purpose-built for a division that was sold shortly before > the lab was completed. > > And the corollary is that junky buildings, like MIT's famous Building > 20 [1] (built as temporary lab space during WWII, but used for more > than 50 years) are often the most productive spaces for novel ideas > because no one cared what happened to it -- labs routinely drilled > holes in walls and floors to make space or connections for unwieldy > equipment, for example. > > Really makes me wonder about Apple's new headquarters which is > probably too beautiful to hack if a flexible space is needed, and now > Amazon's stated goal of adding a second headquarters. > > > Ken Meltsner > > [1] Brand, Stewart (1995). How buildings learn: what happens after > they're built. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-14-013996-9., cited > at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20 > _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork