Learning from iPhones
Why?
What is the most advanced, innovative, popular architecture?
Hardware and software architecture, especially that of apple’s iPhone.
People become obsessed and wait in anticipation for the Apple Event, where they showcase the latest apple devices. Months before the apple event, news from around the world covers the rumoured specs and features, especially the design of the physical interface. Unreleased hardware and features are the centre of media attention, leading to countless lawsuits against the perpetrators (Rosenblatt 2021; Apple v. Lancaster).
When finally released, people start queuing outside apple stores, to be the first to get their hands on the iPhones (Figure 1). We have all seen the images of excited customers receiving their new iPhones (Figure 2).
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Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 1: People waiting outside Apple Fifth Avenue, New York for the launch of the iPhone 11 series (Apple 2019a).
​Figure 2: New York Apple Store team welcoming the first customers purchasing iPhone 11 (Apple 2019b).
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Apple sells the ideal, the convenience each seamless connection between products and services bring to users. Apple’s 10-year journey to aggressively build the ‘Apple Experience’ to be part of daily life. Where every touchpoint, the iPhone near one’s body 24/7, the Apple Watch attached to the wrist, the services storing one’s life is connected and integrated in the ecosystem that becomes an extension of the human body. Isn’t this replacing the Architecture ideal? Is Apple the 21st Century Architecture?
Because this never happens for architecture. People don’t exert oneself to rumours or investigate in illegal means to discover the newest architecture building to be built. There are no so called ‘architecture’ events, where the global public are invited to explore the new structure. Obviously, no standing ovations to visitors entering, or the camping outside the building a day or two before to be the first to experience the building. The closest to the anticipation that draws mere anticipation and excitement to a few niche groups, is the rendered trailers of the buildings that are only to be seen within architecture related media, design magazines and government proposals.
“Architecture is irrelevant” is an understatement.
When compared to the ancient times, or we don’t even need to go too far back; for even during the industrial revolution, the crystal palace in 1853 was “one of the world’s great triumphs of intuitive engineering, and as with all great engineering, it was also great architecture.”(Kihlstedt 1984)
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What caused architecture’s great engineering triumphs to shift to software engineering’s triumphs of 21st Century?
It is the lacking in innovation facilitated by the universal “cookie cutter” design methods. It is the incompetent architects ‘unable to defy the boundaries of a typical corporate brief’(Forlano 2016). It is architects not trained to think critically about socio-technical problems in a time of socio-technical complexities, driven by emerging technologies shaping the cities into ‘Smart Cities’. Where smart homes, smart industries and smart factories will be the new paradigm (Basarir-Ozel, Turker, and Nasir 2022)(Global smart home penetration has an annual growth rate of 13.97%, expected to hit 25.0% by 2026, and amounting to 573.7m users(Statista 2022)), architects are not equipped with the skills to construct advanced, technically-immersed, engineering product of the 21st Century. The issue is that current skills still parallel the construction of an 1853 Crystal Palace Building. Architects are not equipped with skills that parallel the exponential growth of architecture constructed from the building blocks of technology. The irrelevance of architects will become a reality. Thus, the hybrid architectural engineering, existent in iPhones (product of science and technology) and its translation into ‘smart space’ must be embraced.
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Apple's
Patented
Tables
Parallel between
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Why should there be more attention, care and innovation invested in iPhones and not in architecture?
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Though an iPhone is a necessity to human life in the modern digital era, is it more of a necessity than architecture that provides dwelling? Aren’t iPhones transcending the virtual experience to compete with architecture as a dwelling?
iPhones that are 100x the miniature scale of the bathroom in a building. So much advancement + technology + innovation is squashed inside the iPhone. Thousands of the brightest minds in the world work on the iPhone for years before its release, and just for the TouchID alone, 66 teams worked on the feature. The same teams and people develop and advance the iPhones each year(Joel M. Podolny 2020). Contrastingly, in architecture, where each building is worth millions, only has few people to few teams working on it, even in major architectural projects the maximum is not even close to Apple’s teams.
Hence, the question is: what is more significant, architecture or iPhone? Architecture’s significance outweighs iPhones, considering the inherent necessity of humans is to live and dwell under a shelter this is ironic. We commonly hear of the death of architecture, but how can Architecture renew its long-lost pride?
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The solution:
To learn from iPhones, learn from Apple.