Visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House, Los Angeles

Table Of Content

• An Insider’s Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House
• Places to Stay in Los Angeles
• The Barnsdall Library
• A Brief Tour of the Hollyhock House

In 2007, the City and Project Restore, a public-private partnership, began planning a project to address structural needs and restoration. In 2010, the project team began four years of work to repair and prevent water damage, seismically strengthen the house, restore historic elements, and reverse past alterations. Built between 1919 and 1921, Hollyhock House was the first Los Angeles commission for the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

An Insider’s Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House

She never questioned the beauty or significance of Wright’s work on Olive Hill, but with early leaks and no theater to speak of, the house had lost its luster for Barnsdall. She did, however, reengage with Wright on numerous occasions after 1921, enlisting him to design a school house for the property as well as preliminary plans for another residence in Beverly Hills; neither were realized. In 1915, Aline Barnsdall, an oil heiress, first approached Frank Lloyd Wright not to build a house but a theater.

Places to Stay in Los Angeles

Barnsdall Art Park on Olive Hill in Hollywood, California is now owned and run by the City of Los Angeles. The City of Los Angeles is home to many architectural treasures, none more intriguing than Hollyhock House. The Department of Cultural Affairs manages this and four other entities in Barnsdall Art Park, but the focus of this photo journey is on Hollyhock House. Built between 1919 and 1921, the house realized by Wright for Louise Aline Barnsdall is an architectural experiment among landscaped gardens, hardscaped pools, and galleries of art on Olive Hill.

The Barnsdall Library

Oil heiress Aline Barnsdall commissioned the house as the centerpiece of a cultural arts complex on Olive Hill, which was to include a major theatre, cinema, artist residences, and commercial shops. For Hollyhock House, her personal residence, Barnsdall asked Wright to incorporate her favorite flower, the hollyhock, into the design. In 1927, Barnsdall donated the house and the surrounding 12 acres (now Barnsdall Park) to the City of Los Angeles. Today, Hollyhock House is owned and operated by the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA). Yet it was renovated several times, had long suffered from water intrusion, and was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

David & Gladys Wright House

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A passionate supporter of the arts, she was a stage producer—earning critical acclaim for her avante-garde productions for children and adults alike in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (while awaiting a Wright-designed theater that never came). In 1919, she purchased Olive Hill, a 36-acre mount on Hollywood’s eastern edge and far north of downtown Los Angeles. With the site secured, the commission grew to include plans for the theater, a cinema, artist residences, commercial shops, two guest houses, and a residence for Barnsdall.

Frank Lloyd Wright + Arizona

Water is meant to flow from a pool in the courtyard through a tunnel to this inside moat, and out again to a fountain. Disillusioned by the costs of construction and maintenance, Barnsdall donated the house to the city of Los Angeles in 1927[8] under the stipulation that a fifteen-year lease be given to the California Art Club for its headquarters. The club was there until 1942 when the house was almost demolished.[9] The house has been used as an art gallery and as a United Service Organizations (USO) facility over the years. Beginning in 1974, the city sponsored a series of restorations, but the structure was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

For Hollyhock House, Barnsdall asked Wright to incorporate her favorite flower, the hollyhock, into the home’s design. As with many of Wright's residences, Hollyhock House has an "introverted" exterior with windows that seem hidden from the outside, and is not easy to decode from the outside. The house is arranged around a central courtyard with one side open to form a kind of theatrical stage (never used as such), and a complex system of split levels, steps and roof terraces around that courtyard.

He designed it for Aline Barnsdall, a wealthy iconoclast and patron of the arts (learn more about her here). Barnsdall envisioned the house as the centerpiece of an artists’ colony on Olive Hill in the neighborhood of Los Feliz. Hollyhock House was designed by America’s most important 20th-century architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Aline Barnsdall was also a philanthropist and in 1927 gave the house and the surrounding twelve acres atop Olive Hill (now Barnsdall Park) to the City of Los Angeles as a memorial to her father Theodore. With project delays and cost overruns, he then left the project only partially realized. Within a few years, Barnsdall began to consider gifting the house and surrounding parklands to the City of Los Angeles.

HOLLYHOCK HOUSE

100 years after Frank Lloyd Wright finished construction on Aline Barnsdall’s Residence A guest house, the City of Los Angeles has concluded phase I restoration of this landmark structure. The first video provides an overview from the project team, discussing the home’s significance, what’s been done in phase I, and what work is still to come. Barnsdall bought Olive Hill in 1919 from the widow of the man who had planted the olive trees. Wright eventually came up with grand plans that suited Barnsdall's theatricality, although she and her daughter never lived in the house that Wright built.

A Philosophy of Software Design Book Summary and Top Ideas

Table Of Content

• The nature of complexity
• Chapter 11 — Design it Twice
• Human-AI Guidelines in Practice: Leaky Abstractions as an Enabler in Collaborative Software Teams
• My learnings from the book "A Philosophy of Software Design"

Fundamental optimizations typically obtain the most significant optimization improvements. For instance, it can modify the data structure or algorithm or add a cache. To optimize the code and come as near to this ideal condition as feasible, the next step is to reorder it. In Chapter 11, the author considered a perfect way of thinking about designing software, and that is trade-offs. It is doubtful that you will produce the best design from your first thoughts about it, but it would be much better to have multiple options to choose from and analyze which one is the best for your case. Event-driven programming makes it hard to follow the flow of control.

The nature of complexity

The chapter ends with a good example from the RAMCloud system, where this thinking is applied to buffer allocation code, for a speed-up of a factor of two for the most common operation. Finally, also somewhat related to deep modules, is the idea that different layers should use different abstractions. For example in TCP, the top level abstraction is that of a stream of bytes. The lower level uses an abstraction of packets that can be lost or reordered. If adjacent layers contain the same or very similar abstractions, perhaps they should be combined to create a deeper module. A sign that this is the case is that there are pass-through methods – methods that does little more than calling other methods with the same or very similar signatures.

Chapter 11 — Design it Twice

In some examples, the author recommends that some domain concepts are explained in the comments, in case the reader isn’t familiar with them. However, for well-known domain concepts, the reader will almost certainly already be familiar with those concepts. Even if they are not, the comments aren’t the right place to explain them. If the lower index is below zero, or the higher index is beyond the string length, an IndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown. This forces the caller to handle these cases before calling substring.

Human-AI Guidelines in Practice: Leaky Abstractions as an Enabler in Collaborative Software Teams

It's more important for a module to have a simple interface than a simpleimplementation. If you have complexity that is closely related to your module'sfunctionality, you should consider pulling that complexity into the module'simplementation. Ousterhout's most often-used approach to this problem is to introduce a contextobject, which stores the application's global state - anything that wouldotherwise be a pass-through or global variable. They are not an ideal solutionbecause they have a lot of the disadvantages of global variables, but they canreduce the complexity of a method's signature.

Refuting arguments against comments

John argues that exceptions introduce one of the worst sources of complexity and advocates for writing code that needs no exceptions to run. This is a section that seems to build on John's own experience, and him analyzing Windows APIs and does not bring classroom examples. Software design philosophy emphasizes the importance of designing software with flexibility and extensibility in mind. Building software systems that can adapt to changing requirements or accommodate new features is crucial for long-term success. Developers achieve this by designing software with well-defined interfaces, using design patterns, and applying modular and decoupled architectures. Flexible and extensible designs allow software to evolve and grow without requiring significant rework or disruption.

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Chapter 13 — Comments Should Describe Things that Aren’t Obvious from the Code

The book doesn’t focus on a specific programming language or framework but rather presents general software design ideas. "Exception handling is one of the worst sources of complexity in softwaresystems". They can leak abstraction details upwards, making for a more shallowabstraction. Programmers are often taught that they need to handle exceptionalcases, leading for an over-defensive programming style. One pitfall is that complexity in software development is incremental.

Chapter 15 — Write The Comments First

Tradeoffs when combining or separating implementations within modules or interfaces (Chapter 9) is an interesting debate that I don't know of a single best answer. We share this view with John, who also agrees the best solution will be context-dependent. John collects a few rules of thumbs he suggests to use when deciding to combine or separate. Combine when it makes for a simpler interface, to reduce duplication or when implementations share data/information. Software design is a critical aspect of developing reliable and high-performing software applications.

The functionality could have been provided by just one such class, reducing the boilerplate code needed. Furthermore, commonly needed features, such as buffered I/O, should be the default behavior, with extra parameters or setup only needed when it isn’t the common case. A Philosophy of Software Design is a well-written book with many good and practical ideas on how to reduce complexity to make systems easier to understand and work with. There are good examples illustrating the various techniques, and the writing is clear and concise.

My learnings from the book "A Philosophy of Software Design"

You can apply the ideas in this book to minimize the complexity of large software systems so that you can write software more quickly and cheaply. For people who have less experience in software development, the remaining of the book will also be practical. The parts on writing comments before coding, and comments complimenting the code are decent strategies to start with. Those with more experience under their belt my disagree with some of the recommendations.

Complexity makes it more difficult for a programmer to understandand change software, it increases the rate of errors, it slows developmentvelocity, and has other negative affects. I agree with the notion that if there are tricky aspects of the code that are not obvious from reading it, then you should write a comment. There are also two good examples on pages 118 and 119 on how to write comments for cross-module design decisions. In the scripting language Tcl that the author created, the unset instruction removes a variable.

In this article, we explore the philosophy of software design and its importance in the development process. Each piece of design infrastructure added to a system, such as an interface, argument, function, class, or definition, adds complexity, since developers must learn about this element. In order for an element to provide a net gain against complexity, it must eliminate some complexity that would be present in the absence of the design element.

While event-driven programming is certainly more complex, due to no clear flow of control, in real-world scenarios, this is a necessity. Both in the case of distributed systems, as well as multi-threaded environments, there is no other option. John's suggestion to add a comment for event handlers doesn't cut it in my book. Instead, monitoring errors, alerting (for backend code) and logging, uploading, and analyzing logs (for client-side applications) is one way to stay on top of the system working correctly at all times. Much of modern programming, from messaging services to frameworks like Fx is moving towards an asynchronous model, where dealing with this complexity is part of the job. A strong stance against exceptions (Chapter 10) was an interesting read.

It involves the process of conceptualizing, planning, and defining the structure, architecture, and functionality of a software system. To create software that is not only functional but also maintainable and scalable, developers embrace a philosophy of software design. This philosophy encompasses principles, strategies, and best practices that guide developers in crafting well-designed, robust, and efficient software solutions.

I'm currently engaged in developing a prototype of what is going to be an extremely large software application, which tackles a multitude of complex tasks and issues. As an engineering manager, I strongly advocate and sometimes even insist on designing systems twice or even three times. Note that this is a countrary suggestion to the one from the “Clean code” book of Uncle Bob Martin. Here are some things that I found valuable in this book, and they are located primarily in chapters 2 to 11. You'll end up with a much better result if you consider multiple options foreach major design decision.

My learnings from the book "A Philosophy of Software Design"

Table Of Content

• Other materials, books, articles, etc.
• Chapter 15 — Write The Comments First
• Software Design Book
• BONUS: A Philosophy of Software Design, John Ousterhout (Talks at Google)
• A Philosophy of Software Design — Book Summary & Notes
• i. Good code is self-documenting

"If you reduce the number of methods in an API without reducing its overallcapabilities, then you are probably creating more general-purpose methods." An abstraction is asimplified view of an entity which omits unimportant details, making it easierfor us to think about and manipulate complex things. It is more important for a module to have a simple interface than a simple implementation. That being said, we have to be wary of Classitis a term I have come to appreciate and can relate too, as I have worked on many software systems in the past that actually have this issue.

Other materials, books, articles, etc.

If you're interested in whether to read this book, my recommendation is that you probably should, for a few reasons I list in my conclusion. When you’re performing a code review on a class, smell around for special purpose code mixed with general purpose code. This mixture represents an opportunity to split off the general purpose code into something more reusable. But yours is a great review and a valuable service to the IT community that increasingly finds itself facing Technical Debt to the point of bankruptcy. Like reusing a common class, consistent naming lessens cognitive load by enabling readers to quickly draw assumptions when they see the name in a different context because they have already seen it in one.

Chapter 15 — Write The Comments First

Ousterhoutdiscusses the different types and causes of complexity, and then varioussoftware design considerations and their relationship to complexity - patterns,antipatterns, questions to ask, etc. While the book does a good job covering architecture concepts when writing code, there are several areas that it does not touch on. Most of these are outside the scope of the software design course itself. The importance of good and simple naming (Chapter 14) mirror my experience on how simple names often mean simple functionality. Complex names - or difficulty to name something - is usually a code or architecture smell.

Software Design Book

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To add to this, we haven't completely identified all of the issues we will confront. In essence, we still have to discover the Unknown Unknowns as we cautiously proceed. There are also a few weaker chapters towards the end of the book, for example Code Should Be Obvious and Software Trends. Code Complete has a lot more to say about names, and does it better. However, I really liked the story of how a too generic variable name (block) caused a bug that took six months to find. In a lot of places, the author uses comments and documentation interchangeably.

Otherwise, you are better off implementing the system without that particular element. For example, a class can reduce complexity by encapsulating functionality so that users of the class needn’t be aware of it. Classitis may result in classes that are individually simple, but it increases the complexity of the overall system. Small classes don’t contribute much functionality, so there have to be a lot of them, each with its own interface.

Instead you can define it to return the characters of the string (if any) with index greater than or equal to beginIndex and less than endIndex. That way no exception needs to be thrown, which greatly simplifies the usage. Python does something similar when returning an empty result for out-of-range list slices. An example is when you have implemented a message protocol with a sender and a receiver.

List of software development philosophies

Technical debt and architecture debt also don't get much mention or discussion, which is in contrast to my day to day work. It would be nice to see a later version touch on these topics, as well. The book is an easy read, thanks to its short sections and good bolding. Most importantly, the book stays humble, does not try to convince, but offers perspectives backed by easy to follow examples.

A Philosophy of Software Design — Book Summary & Notes

If the code is so complex, we need to comment on it; maybe we can rewrite it to be more straightforward and understandable. Most people use a tactical approach, where the goal is to make something work. However, the result is a bad design with a lot of tech complexity, which usually results in spaghetti code. Complexity is not a single line but many lines in a project, which we overlook as a whole. His recommendation is to take a strategic approach where the working code is not the only goal, but the goal should be great design, which simplifies development and minimizes complexity. It involves breaking down software systems into smaller, independent modules or components, each responsible for a specific functionality or feature.

i. Good code is self-documenting

A singleshortcut or tactical decision that adds complexity won't have much impact, butsmall decisions can accumulate to dozens or hundreds of things that do have animpact. Then refactoring becomes a big task that you can't easily schedule withthe business, so you look for quick patches, and this creates yet morecomplexity, which requires more patches, and so forth. Ousterhout advocates for a strategic approach to software development, ratherthan a wholly tactical approach. This essentially just means ongoing, regularinvestment of some of your development time towards system design, rather thanjust working code. When building software systems, the core challenge is managingcomplexity.

Pass-through variables add complexity because they force intermediate methods tobe aware of their existence, even though the methods have no use for thevariables. Below are the notes I made on takeaways from the book and my thoughts on acouple of the ideas (minus some fun references to real code that I've workedon). I'm publishing the notes as it's a nice way for me to re-read them andretain the information. This doesn't cover all the content in the book, and it'spossible that I misrepresent the author in some of my paraphrasing. If you'reinterested in the content I definitely recommend buying a copy - it's notexpensive and it's an easy read. What makes it especially great from a software related book, is that there is really not a lot of code to read and for what there is, it is just to relay an idea.

We need more resources to remind us not overcomplicate software architecture. It will become complicated enough, module after module, layer after layer. The author argues that if your code throws an exception, you force all callers of that code to know how to handle this exception. Yet, in many cases, callers don’t know what to do about the exception which is thrown. He says we should define our functionality so we never need to throw an exception.