Either I am an incompetent, or these guys are: there is no middle way!

I am talking about the architects who designed the new building of the informatics faculty here in Lugano (we are going to move in it sometime soon). Actually, I have the feeling that I even saw one of them once, and now I am sorry that I did not tell him my opinion of his masterpiece. Or maybe I didn’t tell him anything at the time because I was shocked of what I was hearing: he was explaining to a visitor that, “we have the same conceptual design for this building as for the others: metal black with silver gray”…

Indeed, seen from a distance, the building looks like a futuristic, high security facility. You could even consider that it has some kind of hacker air to it, with its subtle entrance doors and metal grates in front of the windows. In metal black and silver gray.

The “silver gray” comes from the metal grates in front of the windows. A dense sieve that blocks I guess about 30% of the natural light that could go inside the offices. One friend told me that the sieve is called bris-soleil. Whatever… One website which adveritses such things argues that “they protect from sunlight and add a stilish touch to the building”.

Stylish silver gray… The offices inside have wall-sized windows, and the ones loking north, could be pretty nice view. However, the metal grates are put on the outside of the windows covering all their surface, such that in my estimation more than 30% of the light which comes in will be stopped. This is already bad, as natural light is good for your health, some of the european countries have passed legislation on minimal requirements for natural light. But on top of reducing the natural light, the grates make looking outside an unpleasant experience. “It gives you some kind of nausea”, one colleague was saying. Looking on the window an unpleasant experience? What?

Christopher Alexander the author of “The Timeless Way of Building” would cry in terror! One of the main arguments in his book is that you should think first about the quality of life of the persons inside the building rather than at the looks of the building. Or put another way, you should build a building around the people, not force the people in the building. But than again, it is true that many architects did not (and do not) appreciate his work. All my respect for the others!

Third, the offices are narrow. Maybe too narrow… And guess what? The grates in front of the windows make them feel even more narrow. “Design for claustrophobia. We guarantee that you will feel strange after a day’s work!” I bet their company slogan does not say this… Nor their portfolio.

After a quick walk through the building I could make a long list with bad decisions, and I am not a specialist. But that’s not the point. The point is that we should stop asking for fancy buildings. We should stop admiring them when we see them. When you see a pround building-designer showing you the plans for his latest fancy building ask him the rather mundane questions: “Are there enough toliet seats on a floor which is projected to hold 150 persons? Is there a room where people can retreat and have a relaxed time? Do all the rooms in your building have natural light? “…

Then maybe the specialists would understand that we care more about the quality of life than about the looks. Probably, if we did this, some of the current talents would go off and do painting or sculpture, where the “concept” and “style” matter. But if that would happen, I think we will have created a better world.

In Smalltalk, you when an object receives a message that it does not implement, it executes the #doesNotUnderstand: method (which has a default implementation in the Object class). Now, if you override this method in your class, you can do funny stuff like proxies and even more useless things, like the one I will present here :)

The idea that came thourgh my head today and I implemented together with Paolo (not because it was that difficult but because it was that fun) was to override Number>>doesNotUnderstand: such that if the method that is being sent to an object of class Number looks like an attempt to convert something to something else… use Google to convert the thing and return the result. After the task was done, the following expressions suddenly became valid Smalltalk expressions:

1 usdToEur
37 celsiusToFarenheit
1 kmToMile

If you want to see the implementation (although many other better things you probably have to do with your life) check out the Conversions-PoweredByGoogle in the Cincom Public Repository.

There are many lessons to be learned from this experiment. I will however, not mention any. Lessons are to be learnt rather than taught…