䷐ Here Comes the Sun
I hear it coming.
My sister is an architect. Imagine paper models coupled with an uncanny enthusiasm for concrete, not to be confused with cement, which is just glue apparently. When paper form meets concrete material, you get a building!
More to it than that: construction itself.
More to it than that: structural engineering ensures that the material can safely take on the form — ideally before you finish construction.
More to it than that: before everything, the architect needs to know the right relevant thing so she can design in the right relationship to how the building will be situated. She needs to know which way is up.
She says:
North is up, and so like unless you’re using that exact same orientation, your building envelope will fail.
Or as Deanna Van Buren put it when working on the Witness.
One of our first questions we asked Jonathan’s team (Thekla) was “What direction is north?” They replied, “What difference does that make?” I knew then that we would need to recreate and reframe the real world constraints with which we had been working. In order to design customized environments we would need to develop a narrative and new kinds of constraints that would define it … what became our primary constraint — game play.
Fine for a mostly static simulation, but in the real world, north tells you where the sun will be, latitude likewise, and the sun is where heat comes from. Unless you plan on using an ungodly amount of air conditioning, many decisions follow. Where to put windows. How to overhang roofs. How to make the sun warm the building in winter without too much warming in the summer.
Just like the orrery, the most important factor for my sister’s schools is being situated in the right rotational relationship to the sun. Wind has an effect and water 風水 and climate and surrounding roads too — all minor. We get her quote from designing schools specifically. A district might want to reuse a design for several schools, and that might be fine if they all have the exact same compass orientation.
Other features are negotiable, some arbitrary. My sister ranted most about a requirement to have windows facing the road even when the interior mandates walls without windows like in a kitchen. In the end, glass is installed in front of a blank wall or, at best, the glass protects a seasonal decoration in front of a pretty painted wall. Compromise.
Likewise, to understand the meaning of what AI agents say, their situational awareness may matter most. What’s better than a large model whose weights you can somewhat trust to reconstruct a fact? The agent who uses that maybe foggy, maybe clear intuition to find original sources and vet them for accuracy. Well tuned lookup is as much an advantage for any one of the sisters as their foundation model. Maybe when Chat consulted 31 sources to tell us what Plato said, they were actually doing the right relevant work.