Describing what it takes for him to accept a commission, Mr. Gehry says, “The determining factor is: Can I get it done while I am still alive?” Explaining why he doesn’t build houses any more, Mr. Gehry says, “They involve a lot of personal hand holding. I guess at my age I don’t have the patience.”
Probably more than most architects, one sees Mr. Gehry’s buildings–buildings that have been described as resembling ruffling sails or looking like they are melting–and has a sense that there is a single personality behind them.
“I don’t know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do,” Mr. Gehry says. “Architects have to become parental. They have to learn to be parental.” By this he means that an architect has to listen to his client but also remain firm about what the architect knows best, the aesthetics of a building. This, Mr. Gehry says, is what makes an architect relevant in the process that leads to a completed building. “I think a lot of my colleagues lose it, lose that relevance in the spirit of serving their client, so that no matter what, they are serving the client. Even if the building they produce, that they think serves the client, doesn’t really serve the client because it’s not very good.”
Monthly Archives: December 2006
An Interesting Look at Xerox Management’s Missed Market Opportunities (PC’s, the GUI, Networking)
Peter McColough never powered up a personal computer, but he helped unleash the digital revolution.
Many of the technologies at the center of today’s computerized offices and homes — the mouse, the laser printer, the local area network — were first developed in the 1970s at a Silicon Valley skunk works he chartered at Xerox Corp.
But Xerox never reached Mr. McColough’s goal of being at the forefront of what he called “the architecture of information.” The company still best known for copiers pioneered in the 1950s and ’60s failed to develop many of the technologies into marketable products. Instead, a herd of start-ups, often headed by the very workers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Campus who had invented them, rumbled in and created industries in personal computers, networking, office software and others.
“If Xerox had known what it had and had taken advantage of its real opportunities, it could have been as big as IBM plus Microsoft plus Xerox combined — and the largest high-technology company in the world,” Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs is quoted as saying in “Joe Wilson and the Creation of Xerox,” a book by Charles Ellis about the company and its early chief executive.
The reasons for Xerox’s inability to take advantage of its own inventions are debated in business schools to this day. Jacob Goldman, Xerox’s chief scientist at the time who founded PARC, blames short-sighted managers unwilling to take chances on small-scale, unproven technologies. “They managed the company quarter to quarter and looked at the bottom line,” Mr. Goldman says. “They weren’t thinking about the future really.”
A Health Information Exchange Conversation
Dr. John Halamka joins me for this week’s podcast. He’s a renaissance guy: a physician, a CIO, and a healthcare IT innovator whose work I mentioned in a pair of InfoWorld columns. Lots of people are talking about secure exchange of medical records and portable continuity of care documents. John Halamka is on the front lines actually making this these visions real. Among other activities he chairs the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), which began exchanging financial and insurance data almost a decade ago and is now handling clinical data as well in the form of e-prescriptions. The technical, legal, and operational issues are daunting, but you’ll enjoy his pragmatic style and infectious enthusiasm.
“Bad ISP’s
Here’s a list of ISPs (Internet service provider) that are known to cause trouble for BitTorrent clients or P2P in general and the reason why. If you are using one consider finding a new, better one. If your ISP is not on the list come to the IRC channel and tell the OPs, they can add it. Read about Good settings and NAT problem first though.
Interesting OAG Travel Data
“The facts show that scheduled airlines offered more seats in 2006 than ever before with more than three billion seats being made available to the flying public,” said Duncan Alexander, managing director, OAG. “At a very conservative estimate of a 70 percent load factor that means over 2.3 billion passengers will have flown during 2006. That is more than 6.3 million people flying every day of the year on either business or leisure.”
“Given the schedules already in the OAG system for the first quarter of 2007, the trend of more seats and flights being offered by the world’s scheduled airlines, and more people flying on both long and short haul, looks to continue,” he said.
Top 10 National Geographic 2006 Photos
Purported pyramids, giant jellyfish, and a number of pythons that swallowed more than they bargained for were among the stars of this year’s most popular news photos.
2007 Financial Market Forecasts
We polled 80 strategists for their 2007 predictions, and many think tech stocks will be on top. Call it a 7% year. That’s the return the 80 strategists we polled expect in 2007 for the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. Our prognosticators overwhelmingly think technology will be the best-performing sector next year, but still come up with a forecast of only a 9% gain in the tech-heavy NASDAQ Composite. They expect the Russell 2000, an index of small-cap stocks, to lag, with just a 6% return. Strategists are listed according to their yearend Dow forecasts, from the most bullish to the most bearish
Federal Subsidies Turn Farms into Big Business
Gilbert Gaul, Sarah Cohen & Dan Morgan:
The cornerstone of the multibillion-dollar system of federal farm subsidies is an iconic image of the struggling family farmer: small, powerless against Mother Nature, tied to the land by blood.
Without generous government help, farm-state politicians say, thousands of these hardworking families would fail, threatening the nation’s abundant food supply.
“In today’s fast-paced, interconnected world, there are few industries where sons and daughters can work side-by-side with moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas,” Rep. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) said last year. “But we still find that today in agriculture. . . . It is a celebration of what too many in our country have forgotten, an endangered way of life that we must work each and every day to preserve.”
This imagery secures billions annually in what one grower called “empathy payments” for farmers. But it is misleading.
Goodbye VHS, Farewell Fair Use
As VHS tapes and VCRs head the way of Betamax and phonographs, commentator Bill Hammack warns that the right to fair use is in danger of disappearing right along with them.
Back in the 1980s, the Supreme Court ruled VCR makers couldn’t be held liable for copyright infringement.
That gave consumers the right to make personal copies of TV shows and movies using a VCR.
The new digital media that are erasing the VHS format are also erasing our rights.
A few years ago, a Judge issued a catch-22 ruling: Yes, she said, we can copy commercial DVDs too. But no one can sell the software to do that.
Some Skype Numbers
TeleGeography estimates that Skype users are on track to make over 27 billion minutes of computer-to-computer calls this year, with about half of them used for international long distance (all free). While that sounds like a lot, it still represents just 4.4 percent of total international traffic in 2006, up from 2.9 percent in 2005.”
David Isenberg has more:
Even if most of these minutes are new minutes that are only there because C2C Skype is free, this is impressive — in part, because with new computer devices, e.g., open WiFi phones, it is getting hard to distinguish a C2C call from a Phone-to-Phone call. In addition, the new computerphones are erasing the ease-of-use factor that keeps us glued to RJ-11.