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Integrated Versus Fragmented
Having just finished Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs, I would like to comment on, "... the great debate of the digital age: closed versus open, or as Jobs framed it, integrated versus fragmented. Was it better, as Apple believed... to tie the hardware and software and content handling into one tidy system that insured a simple user experience? Or was it better to give users and manufacturers more choice and free up avenues for more innovation by creating software systems that could be modified and used on different devices?"
This issue of "integrated versus fragmented" is just as relevant to architecture as it is to digital technology. For the last 20 years, Marmol Radziner has been expanding our professional services beyond the traditional practice of architecture. We design landscapes, interiors, furniture, prefab housing and architecture and we build it ourselves. Half of our office concentrates on design while the other half figures out how to build it, and the two halves are in constant dialogue. Our goal is to take full responsibility for every increment of design and construction from beginning to end. But, our office is an anomaly.
Back in 1857, the American Institute of Architects established the professional competencies of the field by distancing architecture from engineering and construction, effectively limiting the role of the architect to that of aesthetic consultant. No longer the master builder, today's architect is generally incapable of constructing what he designs. As a result, a client may hire an architect, a contractor, an interior designer, a landscape architect, and a structural engineer just to produce a home. In this leaderless process, the client may unwittingly play the role of "design coordinator" or "mediator" and the results are usually fragmented rather than integrated.
I believe that the reason why Apple products work well and are beautiful is because they were designed and built by one company. Similarly, in order to provide clients with a "simple user experience" architects must begin to take responsibility for the entire process of design and construction. There were some notable professional innovators in the last century, such as Rudolph Schindler, who in 1922, designed and built the Kings Road House and all of the furniture within it. For Marmol Radziner Prefab, we created an entire factory for the production of our prefab homes. In the coming decades, I hope to see many more pioneers who choose an integrated rather than fragmented approach.
The answer of fragmented has been the answer for at least 2 decades. All modern programming fragments their programming from platform(Windows, Apple, Linux, Android, etc.), data(Oracle, Microsoft SQL, MySQL, etc.), Logic(what it does), and UI(how it looks). These are all seperated, because it greatly speeds up development time and allows programs to adapt to the user and the hardware easily. An app designed for an iPad should not look like an application made for Windows. The users are used to different things and they will find what the other user wants difficult and complicated. A bank teller isn't going to expect the same type of interface that a facebook app user will want to see. Yet, with fragments, we don't have to change all the code for each of these cases. We just have to change a very small amount to adapt the code to each device and situation. The one thing Microsoft has done far better than Apple is allow for this fragmentation in their development products, and that is why even for developing products for Apple, most shops use Microsoft products to do so.