"Bruce Sterling - The Interoperation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

The Interoperation
Architecture had given way to software management. So he turned buildings into construction programs.

By Bruce Sterling
Yuri pulled his sons from school to watch the big robot wreck the motel. His wife had packed a tasty
picnic lunch, but 11-year-old Tommy was a hard kid to please. "You said a giant robot would blow that
place up," Tommy said. "No, son, I told you a robot would 'take it down,'" said Yuri. "Go shoot some
pictures for your mom." Tommy swung his little camera, hopped his bamboo bike, and took off. Yuri
patiently pushed his younger son's smaller bike across the sunlit tarmac. Nick, age seven, was learning to
ride. His mother had dressed him for the ordeal, so Nick's head, knees, feet, fists, and elbows were all
lavishly padded with brightly colored foam. Nick had the lumpy plastic look of a Japanese action figure.
Under the crystalline spring sky, the robot -towered over the Costa Vista Motel like the piston-legged
skeleton of a monster printer. The urban recycler had already briskly stripped off the motel's roof. Using
a dainty attachment, it remorselessly nibbled up bricks.

The Costa Vista Motel was the first, last, and only building that Yuri Lozano had created as a certified,
practicing architect. It had been "designed for disassembly," way back in 2020. So today, some 26 years
later, Yuri had hired the giant -deconstruction--bot to fully reclaim the motel's materials: the bricks, the
solar shingles, the electrical fixtures, the metal plumbing. The structure was being defabricated, with a
mindless precision, right down to its last, least, humble hinges.

As he patiently guided the wobbling Nick across the motel's weedy, deserted parking lot, Yuri's reaction
to the day was deep relief. He had never liked the Costa Vista. Never--not since it had left his design
screen.

Once it had looked so good: poised there, safe within the screen. He'd been so pleased with the plan's
spatial purity, the way the 3-D volumes massed together, the nifty way the structure fit the site ... . But the
motel's contractors had been a bunch of screwups. Worse yet, the owners were greedy morons.

So Yuri had been forced to stand by while his digi-tal master plans were cruelly botched at the hands of
harsh reality. Cheap, flimsy materials. Bottom-of-the-barrel landscaping. Tacky signage. Lame interior
décor. Even the name "Costa Vista" was a goofy choice for a motel off an interstate in Michigan.

Yuri had derived one major benefit from this painful experience. He had stopped calling himself an
"architect." After his humiliation at the Costa Vista, he'd packed up his creative ego and thrown in his lot
with the inevitable.

He had joined the comprehensive revolution attacking every aspect of the
construction--architecture--engineering business. The "Next Web." The "Geo-Web." "Ubiquity." The
"Internet of Things." It had a hundred names because it had a thousand victims, for the old-school
Internet had busted loose to invade the world of atoms. Not just certain aspects of harsh reality--the
works.

The architect's blueprints were just the first frontier to fall to comprehensive software management. The
structural engineering would go, too. Then construction: the trades, the suppliers ... . Then the real-estate
biz, the plumbing and electrical, the energy flows, the relationships to the city's grids and the financing
sector, the ever-growing thicket of 21st-century sustainability regulation: yes, all of it would digitize.
Everything. "Total building life-cycle management." People didn't wire houses anymore--they "sheltered
the network."