API design matters »

Michi Henning writes about the cost of bad APIs, and how to design good interfaces:

A great way to get usable APIs is to let the customer (namely, the caller) write the function signature, and to give that signature to a programmer to implement. This step alone eliminates at least half of poor APIs: too often, the implementers of APIs never use their own creations, with disastrous consequences for usability. Moreover, an API is not about programming, data structures, or algorithms—an API is a user interface, just as much as a GUI. The user at the using end of the API is a programmer—that is, a human being. Even though we tend to think of APIs as machine interfaces, they are not: they are human-machine interfaces.

Hungrier Mile ruins prize site: architects »

The NSW State Government is planning on selling East Darling Harbour in “superlots”, which will bypass the site’s architectural design of public streets and non-homogeneous buildings.

“If one developer is owning several blocks, they can do what they like with the streets,” Mr Thalis said. “They can move them, put malls on them, close them, turn them into business parks. The public interest in Sydney is at risk of being stolen by private and commercial interests. I don’t have a problem with density but I do have a problem when it’s at the cost of the public domain. We are the citizens. We own the streets. This will be thrown out the window for a 10-year fashion for big, monolithic buildings.”

Game/Space: An interview with Daniel Dociu »

BLDBLOG interviews game world designer Daniel Dociu:

Are there specific architects, historical eras, or urban designers who have inspired Dociu’s work? What about vice versa: could Dociu’s own beautifully rendered take on the built environment, however fantastical it might be, have something to teach today’s architecture schools? How does the game design process differ from – or perhaps resemble – that of producing “real” cities and buildings?
Of course, there are many types of games, and many types of game environments.

There’s some really beautiful concept design artwork included in the interview.

The mathematics of preservation and the future of urban ruins »

On bldblog: should we preserve civic infrastructure that is historically interesting, but no longer useful?

So the question becomes: at what point do we preserve something not for its historical value but for its topological interest? If a bridge, or a highway overpass, becomes functionally obsolete, is it still subject to the rules of architectural preservation — whether or not it’s mathematically unique or culturally intriguing? Surely infrastructure is just infrastructure — i.e. when it breaks you replace it? You don’t preserve infrastructure.

Or do you?

For visual reference here I mentioned architect Alberto Campo Baeza’s 2002 proposal for a Mercedes Benz Museum. Might Campo Baeza’s structure be a model for what the I-95/695 intersection would look like if it was detached from the highway system and left alone, to be surrounded by new freeways?

Paul Keating on Woolley’s Opera House plan »

Paul Keating has a fun piece in the SMH about Ken Woolley’s plan for a new, unsympathetic opera theatre on Sydney’s Opera House forecourt:

Joern Utzon gave Sydney not only the greatest building of the 20th century but one unique in all history. Its plastic yet classic forms confounded his competitors, who entered designs based on their idolatry of the steel beam and the box-like structures which grew, Meccano-like, from their drawing boards.

A giant box dropped into this space, I believe, has absolutely no merit. And to provide a theatre on the scale proposed by Woolley would need to be much larger, far larger than that illustrated in the Herald. A major auditorium will look like a major auditorium.

Ken Woolley says:

“Some critics will feel it compromises Utzon’s original vision, while others will say it just will not work … It does demand courage. Only the brave would dare build something near the sacred monument.”

Wow, such clever and subtle mind-trickery there from Ken. We’re not cowards just because we don’t like your plan.