Last week a friend came up from Austin, TX. The top of his list of things to see in the Twin Cities was the Flatpak House. A lot really smart people say that comparing software architecture and building architecture is inherently flawed. But the Flatpak House has some interesting lessons for software builders. In the US, 95% of houses are built without an architect, this means the best means for many to get an architect-designed house may be prefab, esp. when cost is a major constraint (when is it not?). Before you dismiss prefab out of hand, consider that in many parts of the midwest Chipotle maybe the best means to getting decent Mexican food. Bucky Fuller spent a lot of time working on prefab bathrooms to combat poor sanitation, inefficiency and cost. 
When design is applied to a specific domain and then scaled, higher quality products whether burritos, bathrooms, or homes maybe produced at a lower cost than inferior goods. Shared services in software are the same way, when ws the last time you wrote a crypto algorithm?
Back to the Flatpak house. They are composeable, _you_ layout the house yourself based on grids. It is an iterative approach where the homeowner and the architect are both engaged in designing the flow and materials. Due to the flat pak (think IKEA for houses) the distribution of materials and overall cost is very competitive. Based on your preference and building site, the components are assembled and plugged into the overall architecture, the coupling of the 8x8 grids allows for flexibility and scalability. I understand that you can push analogies too far, and the architecture analogies do not work in all cases, but stop me if this sounds familiar to software...(Thanks Paul for showing me the house)
Some more images and floor plans To err is human, to modularize is divine.
Instead of buying a 100yr old home in St. Paul. Why did you not buy and build a flatpack?
Posted by: Fred | November 29, 2005 at 02:32 PM