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Fixing Prefab Architecture - by learning from Product Design

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An excellent writeup at Core77 , which also hits upon my pet-peeve with the current fad involving shipping containers While shipping containers have recently enjoyed a high profile as prefab housing components, the fact is they are poorly suited to the job. Shipping containers are windowless boxes—all of their structural integrity is in their vertical corrugated walls. Eliminating these walls to make double-wide spaces means extensive and expensive structural retrofits to allow clear-spans. As for recycled shipping containers, they need to be stripped of about a thousand pounds of toxins before they are ready for habitation. Most important, once shipping containers are modified to be housing modules, they can’t any longer be shipped on the intermodal container network. If you add a 20-foot-wide glass door to a shipping container wall, this door will sit outside of the dimensional envelope of the shipping container—and if you try and cover and protect this glass during shipment, yo...

So you want to be an Architect?

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Sheldon has you covered ...

Overrated Software Architects

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From S ubbu.org, we have this gem You always talk about the big picture. You think you know how the system ought to be built. You are unhappy that the team is not executing your ideas the way you want them. You don’t have a working build. You spend a lot of time on documents that are not code. You can prototype – but your code is not production worthy. You spend too much time in meetings. The best code you wrote is a few years old. When asked for opinions you tend to speak in general terms. Your team members secretly joke about you. You start to take analysts and tech blogs too seriously. You are a dinosaur. Code. Don’t wiki. Don’t powerpoint. I couldn't agree more, but would add the following Your positions never offend anyone You wave away objections by saying "those are implementation details" You know that your hammer can do anything.