What is Important in Secure Software Design?

There are many basic architectural and design mistakes that can compromise the security of a system:

1. Missing something important in security features like access control or auditing, privacy and compliance requirements;
2. Technical mistakes in understanding and implementing defence-against-the-dark-arts security stuff like crypto, managing secrets and session management (you didn’t know enough to do something or to do it right);
3. Misunderstanding architectural responsibilities and trust zones, like relying on client-side validation, or “I thought that the data was already sanitized”;
4. Leaving the attack surface bigger than it has to be – because most developers don’t understand what a system’s attack surface is, or know that they need to watch out when they change it;
5. Allowing access by default, so when an error happens or somebody forgets to add the right check in the right place, the doors and windows are left open and the bad guys can walk right in;
6. Choosing an insecure development platform or technology stack or framework or API and inheriting somebody else’s design and coding mistakes;
7. Making stupid mistakes in business workflows that allow attackers to bypass checks and limits and steal money or steal information.

Learning about Secure Software Design

If you want to build a secure system, you need to understand secure design. Hopefully you won’t start by reading Secure Software Design by Richardson and Thies. While it does describe many of the major issues in application security and IT security in general, and some common threats and vulnerabilities, it (ironically, given the title) doesn't explain how to do secure software design. And too much of the “practical information” in the book is dangerously almost but not quite right: the section on XSS for example, which does mention output escaping, but doesn't explain how to do it properly or that it is much more important than “Scrubbing input for unnecessary characters and altering necessary but possibly dangerous characters” (however you would go about doing that safely). Or mostly wrong: the section on secure database design – no, “One of the simplest ways to protect a web application from an [sic] SQL injection attack is to validate all input parameters” is not correct, and “You should also avoid dynamic SQL and use parameterized stored procedures” is not close enough to being correct to be understood or followed properly. The book does raise awareness of application security issues, and early on the authors do point readers to CERT, SANS and OWASP, so there is hope that students will find and use those resources instead of relying on this book.

Principles – Motherhood and Apple Pie, or Goodness and Rightness and So What?

Every book that takes on secure software design, even a good book like Secure and Resilient Software Development by Merkow and Raghavan, spends time going through basic secure design principles: The importance of C and I and maybe A. Modularity and compartmentalization, separation of responsibilities, economy of mechanism (an unsimple way to say simplicity), least privilege, defence in depth certainly but not security through obscurity, complete mediation (uh huh), and psychological acceptability, and whatever else Saltzer and Schroeder wrote up 40 years ago.

All good and true and wise and right ideas to live by, but you can read this stuff all day (if you can stay awake through it) and it won’t help you to design a more secure system. There’s nothing clear or actionable here – it’s preaching and high-level hand waving. You can’t tell if you have done enough of it, you’ll never know if you got it right or what you missed, or what really important and what isn't.

Threats and Attacks and Risks – Learning to be Afraid of …something…

The rest of secure design is mostly about threats and attacks and exploits – risk-focused threat modeling exercises. Developers design something nice, and then a security expert comes in and attacks their design, looks for weaknesses and oversights, enumerates threats and walks through attack trees and vulnerabilities and tells the developers what they missed and what some theoretical attacker might be able to take advantage of to compromise the system.

This is difficult stuff for developers to understand, and difficult for them to get excited about: you’re asking developers – concrete problem solvers – to think about problems that will "probably never" happen. And to do it properly requires that you not only understand how the system works (and the technology that it works on), but also what kind of attacks are possible in what contexts (and how likely they really are), which means you need specialized experience and knowledge that most developers don’t have and can’t get easily.

But even if you know this stuff and follow a structured approach like STRIDE or maybe Trike there’s no way to know if you’ve done a good job of threat modeling, if you've done enough of it and if you've identified all the important problems, or if you’ve missed some important attack vector or critical vulnerability and your gonna be pwned anyway.

Threat modeling, at least the way it is commonly understood, with expensive meetings where architects and developers and testers and security experts and project managers get together to methodically walk through design documents, and then write up CYA paperwork afterwards, doesn’t fit with the way that most developers actually work – especially developers on Agile teams who do most of their design work incrementally and iteratively, constantly refining and filling the design in as they go. Or developers maintaining legacy systems under constant pressure to fix or change something that is already there as fast and cheaply as they can. There isn’t time or space to fit in threat modeling meetings or all that documentation and paperwork, and it’s probably not the best use of time if they could find some.

Even lighter weight threat modeling hasn't made much of an inroad in development shops and I am not convinced that it will.

Secure Design Checklists, Cheat Sheets and Patterns

When developers are designing and building a system, they want to look forward: towards understanding the problem they are trying to solve and what they need to build and how they can get it built quickly. Rather than looking back at what people missed or did wrong, it’s more valuable and practical and cost-effective to focus on what they should and can do upfront as part of the design – the practices and patterns and tools that they should use and what they shouldn’t, the problems that they have to look out for when they are making design decisions and trade-offs.

I've talked before about how important and useful checklists can be in software security: simple steps and things to think about when working on different design problems, to make sure that you aren't missing something important or doing something stupid.

Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices site includes an (unfortunately “retired”) secure architecture and design review checklist which covers most of the things that you need to think about when designing a secure app. In case this checklist disappears some day, a full copy of it is included in Merkow and Raghavan's book on Secure and Resilient Software Development.

OWASP has a secure design checklist, but it is not targeted to developers – it’s a tool to help an auditor run security design reviews in a document-heavy waterfall environment. There is an OWASP Application Architecture Cheat Sheet (currently in draft), which includes some good questions to ask in initial architecture and high-level design. The rest of the OWASP Cheat Sheets can be used to help designers and coders with specific application security problems – as long as you know what problems you need to solve.

There’s also been some work on secure patterns, which could be useful for developers who take a pattern-based approach to software design. The SEI’s Secure Design Pattern catalog is an attempt to include security in some common software design patterns (secure versions of Factory, Strategy, Builder, Chain of Responsibility…), or to apply patterns to some common software security problems. And there are a couple of books like Core Security Patterns (an intimidating 1000+ page list of security patterns for big standards-based J2EE apps) and Security Patterns in Practice (which has just been published). However, these patterns have not made it to the mainstream – I don’t know many real-life developers who are even aware of these patterns, never mind tried to apply them.

One of the most useful tools I've come across in the secure design space is SD Elements, an online software service which helps development teams make application security decisions. You start by describing your project and its security and compliance requirements and the language(s)/platform that you’re using, and SD Elements guides you through a set of questions and options on how to deal with important security aspects of the design, implementation and testing of the system. It helps you to understand the decisions that you need to make, and holds your hand as you make them.

Security in Design, not Secure Design

Secure design shouldn't be about things that you don’t understand or can’t do anything about. Secure design should be about understanding the problems that you can and should take care of on your own and the problems you shouldn't.

Understanding what your system’s attack surface looks like and what to look out for when you change it.

How trust zones work.

Where and why and how you should use proven application security frameworks and libraries like Shiro or ESAPI, or how to properly leverage the security capabilities of your application framework (Rails or Play or Spring or whatever…).

The first step – and the most important step – is to get software designers and architects to think about security when they think about design, in the same way that they think about time-to-market and developer convenience, or performance or reliability or future proofing or technical elegance. Not just the security features that they should a have stories for, but security as a continuous thread in architecture and design.

When they select tools and languages and frameworks and platforms.

When they think about architectural responsibilities and layering and patterns.

And when they work with data: identifying and tracing and protecting confidential and private information and secrets, taking care of data validation properly, and thinking about safe data access and data storage.

Secure design has to fit into design and how design it is done. It has to be part of decisions as design decisions are being made, not bolted on afterwards in audits and reviews.

Library Outing to St Peter's Seminary, Cardross

Last Saturday, a troupe of intrepid ramblers, otherwise known as GSA Library & Learning Resources team, embarked on a self-guided tour of the Kilmahew Estate in Cardross. We had absconded from Garnethill with one simple mission: to find the ruins of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia's masterpiece, St Peter's Seminary. And, of course, to discuss it over lunch! It's fair to say that this had all the hallmarks of a Gillespie, Kidd & Coia pilgrimage being made in the footsteps of early Christian missionaries, Scots nobility and trainee priests as we soon discovered from our appointed tour-guide, Architecture Librarian David Buri!

We set off in the morning under a murky-looking sky and proceeded into the woods at Kilmahew Estate - a moving sea of cagoules and backpacks. Thankfully for us, the weather was on our side, and as we progressed further from the perimeter and through the rhododendrons, the only thing we had to fear was the odd crack of a golf-ball from Cardross Golf Course, in dangerously close proximity to the track! Stepping through the undergrowth, we tried to recreate in our minds the original grandeur of the the estate's ornamental gardens, driveways and parkland. Two exceptionally tall redwood trees flanking the path at the original entrance were a reminder of the estate's historic roots and the status it would have enjoyed, only decades ago. 

At the top of the route we reached our destination: the dramatic ruins of St Peter's Seminary, built in the 1960s and abandoned since 1980. The post-apocalyptic scene we encountered is something to behold: a derelict building, ravished by time, blemished by grafitti, yet still powerfully capable of inducing frissions down the spine. Perhaps it's down to our current fetish for all things Brutalist, but this was similar to experiencing the sublime in nature - achieved through architecture!

The photos we're used to seeing in the GKC Archive in GSA's Archive and Collection Centre are black and white so we were unprepared for Kilmahew Estate's vivid colours. Sienna-cobbled stonework, red tree-bark, green, lilac and pink shrubbery and neon grafitti have created a unique collage: something like a forgotten space-ship crash in medieval times or the set of a science-fiction film! At close range, it's overwhelmingly apparent why the seminary is often given the accolade of being the best example of work by partners Andy MacMillan and Izi Metzstein and is revered by many as the most important piece of twentieth-century modernist architecture in post-war Britain. The contrasting curved and angular walls of the complex envelope the ruins of the once standing Kilmahew House which once stood as the structure's fourth wall. The majestic design and the scale of the concrete build is incredible; as too is the clear level of disrepair. We were thrilled, surprised and dismayed all at once!

As one of the few post-war buildings to be granted A-listed status, there is something melancholic and aesthetically-alluring about the seminary's abandonment, demise and unorthodox appropriation by grafitti artists. While its conservation seems to be something of an architectural frisbee, plans to conserve it as a community space were submitted by landscape architects erz in February of this year. To read more about the proposed rehabilitation of St Peter's, make sure to check for updates on Glasgow Architecture's website.

Reincarnation emerged as a recurrent theme as we followed the tour onwards. The entire Kilmahew Estate has had many incarnations - each new vision and design has been followed by decline and ruin. After the excitement of the seminary, we also discovered the ruins of nearby Kilmahew Castle, and explored the gardens where an ornamental pond, waterfall and rhododendron tunnel can be found. It was then onto a nearby farm-shop and tearoom for a well-deserved lunch and post-tour analysis! We even found time to stop at nearby Geilston Hall on the road back to Glasgow, a drill-house designed by a young Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1889.

The tour is free to download from The Royal Geographical Society's website as part of the Discovering Britain project. You can download written and audio guides from the website. The booklet (available to download here: Kilmahew – walk booklet and in stock in GSA Library) includes the black and white images of St Peter’s Seminary from the GSA Gillespie, Kidd & Coia archive. Check the ACC blog for related GKC posts.

'Ghost of Water Row' is RIAS 2013 Award Winner

Edo Architecture's evanescent art installation 'Ghost of Water Row' is among the dozen winners of the RIAS Awards 2013. The list of the twelve best buildings in Scotland was announced at an awards ceremony on Wednesday night with Edo's zero-budget, Govan-based submission scooping the accolade alongside big-budget projects such as The Beacon Arts Centre in Greenock and Aberdeen University's new £30m library.

Now in its second year, the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS) Awards recognise architectural achievement in Scotland. The award organisers expressed delight with the number and quality of all 75 submissions with the varied award winners representing a vote of confidence for Scottish architecture.

To learn more about 'The Ghost of Water Row' which commemorates the late sculptor George Wylie, read our previous blog post. The full list of RIAS Award winners is here.

RIBA Online Exhibition for Bedford Lemere & Co.

The latest online exhibition from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) provides a comprehensive platform for exploring the architectural photography of Bedford Lemere & Co. 

'Recording the New' is a plotted history of the establishment, rise and reputation of the photography firm between 1870 and 1930, revealing images from the photography firm's vast portfolio and snapshots of the public archive, held by English Heritage. Based on the exhibition of the same name held at the V&A in 2011, it is a glimpse into the ongoing project by English Heritage to conserve, catalogue and scan their archive of photographs and negatives- one of the largest relating to the photography firm. The aim is to make digital copies of all the images accessible online. 8,000 can already be searched through the English Heritage Archives, providing those impressed by the exhibition with a further avenue for research. 

Formed towards the end of the nineteenth century by founders Bedford Lemere and son Harry, the London-based photography company documented changes to Britain as it teetered uncertainly on the brink of the twentieth century and then advanced into the new technological age. Architect clients and designers commissioned the firm to take photographs of new works from large-scale architectural works to domestic interiors and new urban developments. Today these photographs of now historic settings and features provide a visual record of our heritage. They are also key examples of the period's growing interest in the medium of photography as a means of capturing pioneering change.

GSA Library hold two collections of photographs by Bedford Lemere; one taken of Glasgow City Chambers and another of interiors designed by influential designers including Morris & Co. and Grinling Gibbons. These can be consulted in the Mackintosh Library. The Archives & Collection Centre also keep photographs taken of the Art School in 1910. For an appointment to view either item, visit the Librarians' Office on Level 1 of the Library, or see contact details for the School's archive at this link.

Country Life Release Scottish Castle Articles

For the first time, architecture magazine Country Life are releasing a selection of online articles which examine Scottish castles.The featured castles are Balmoral, Culzean, Glamis and Stirling, with articles also written on the regal setting at Holyroodhouse and the Jacobean romance at Traquair House.

The Library hold an extensive back-run of the weekly Country Life magazine from when it first began in 1897. With the Library refurbishment due to start on Monday, access to printed copies will be limited until mid-September to the pre-1985 issues. There is good news however: a high number of the magazine's recent quality articles are freely accessible through a search of the Country Life website.

Some of these articles are illustrated with quality images forming an impressive online photo gallery. The architecture, gardens and interior design of some of the most desirable and stately country homes in Britain and abroad form an impressive bank of images which could come in useful. For example, we discovered this vintage cover of Country Life from August 3rd 2012 on the Scottish Castles home-page.

Cosmogenesis: 1,2,3 for the GFT!

With work in progress to add a third screen to the Glasgow Film Theatre on Rose Street, we thought we'd take the opportunity to take a closer look at the history of Glasgow's much loved, art-house cinema.

The GFT began life in May 1939 as The Cosmo and was the first art-house cinema to be opened outside London. Architect W.J. Anderson II of John McKissick & Son designed the building as a homage to the Curzon in Mayfair, the longest established art-house cinema in the UK.

The brown-brick, windowless facade and towered entrance are inspired by European modernist architecture of the time, notably that of the Dutch designer Willem Dudok best known for the brick Hilversum City Hall near Amsterdam. In the book Architecture of Glasgow held by GSA Library, the authors describe the building as set on a plinth of black Swedish granite and clad in Ayrshire brick with a cream faience trim. Unbeknown to many, Gillespie Kidd & Coia replaced the lighted glass canopy in the mid-1960s and rebuilt the offices which back onto Renfrew Street.

The Cosmo was reincarnated as the Glasgow Film Theatre in 1974. Since then, it has been remodelled to include two screens and Cafe Cosmo which will sadly cease to exist when the new 60-seat cinema is built on top of the existing bar. The cafe with its dimly-lit ambience has been a popular meeting place for conversation between film enthusiasts. Alasdair Gray may be making a thinly-veiled allusion to Cafe Cosmo in Lanark's opening line in his description of The Elite Cafe, "entered by a staircase from the foyer of a cinema." The eponymous hero who spends his time walking and visiting libraries and cinemas, may in Gray's imagination, have been a frequent visitor - especially given the artist's proximity to the cinema as a student of GSA in the 1950s. There are plans to develop a new cafe to the rear of the revamped cinema in addition to an office, kiosk and canopy and it will be exciting to see whether this feature retains its verve!

Today the GFT continues to contribute to the cultural and artistic scene in Glasgow with the £1.6 million development surely enhancing this position. The 1930s design marks it out from the run-of-the-mill entertainment multiplexes which welcome droves of sugar-frenzied cinema-goers through the doors to indulge in the guilty pleasures of the latest multi-million grossing blockbuster. Always the serious older sibling, the GFT is unique for the crowds it attracts to watch its cult screenings, something to which the success of the Glasgow Film Festival is testimony.

Cineworld may have the distinction of being the world's tallest cinema, but given its designated 'Carbunkle' status, it's the art-deco charm of the GFT that more stylishly represents Glasgow's continuing obsession with the pictures!

Tall Tales: Creative Writing Inspired by Architecture

"Buildings became unusual to me and I realised this oddness was a lot more interesting... I wondered what would happen if I put my work at the service of the unusual."

Pip Adam, a student from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand has taken a novel approach to her Creative Writing PhD thesis by immersing herself in the world of architecture and engineering. 

She shares her experiences of the influence of architecture on the creative-writing process in an article, 'At the Service of the Unusual,' which appears in The Pantograph Punch, an online magazine reporting on arts and culture in New Zealand. 

The article is interesting for its insight into a creative person's attempt to understand and capture the essence of what constitutes a building, and as a fascinating outside perspective on the world of engineering and architecture. Pip describes how a meeting with an architect-friend shifts her focus from the people in her stories to think differently about the ubiquitous university buildings she sees on campus. She enrols in engineering classes at Victoria University School of Architecture and Design and becomes fascinated by the 'rhythm' of buildings and the relationship between individuals and built forms, bravely surrendering herself to the language and philosophy of an alien world!

A philosophically-complex piece of writing that challenges our thoughts and ideas about the building and the creative thought-process around trying to tackle the subject.We particularly enjoyed Pip's humorous observations and easy-to-read, conversational style. Who knew for example, that Dostoevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer were all engineers!?

Brutally Honest - Scottish Brutalism Site from University of Strathclyde

The threat of demolition looming large over increasing numbers of Brutalist buildings has inadvertently thrust the style back into the public conscience. Down the road at University of Strathclyde, planners are still refusing to rule out demolition of its famous architecture building while in England, Preston Council's bid to block Preston Bus Station being granted listed heritage status rumbles on.

Brutalist architecture has courted controversy since its inception in 1950s Britain. Simultaneously held up as an affordable solution for public buildings and cheap housing and as an urban decay problem, the buildings have, over the decades, weathered the critics little better than the elements. As more beleaguered buildings are condemned to demolition, efforts are being stepped up to conserve the architecture style's heritage.

Enter research student Ross Brown who has launched the website scotbrut.co.uk to accompany the Scottish Brutalism project at the University of Strathclyde. The site is modestly being billed as a work in progress, downplaying the extremely useful and well-researched content on offer. The aim is to illustrate the quality and variety of the architecture style around Glasgow and the west region of Scotland through the continuous mapping, documenting and archiving of prime examples. There are a number of high-quality images of the Strathclyde campus and the Charing Cross area, as well as an article by Brown on Glasgow School of Art's former Newbery Tower. Our top tip would be to check the links to other sites, which lists Robert Proctor and Ambrose Gillick's project-blog on Roman Catholic Architecture in Britain, and the illustrated online database of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia images. The fact that many of these sites have direct relevance to the Brutalist style, is in itself, evidence of growing popular interest.

To be alerted to new posts from the scotbrut.co.uk website, follow @scotbrut on Twitter, or join the mailing list.

Plan to Restore Jaded Langside Halls has Green Light

Local architecture firm Collective Architecture have won the tender to begin restorative work on Glasgow's Langside Hall in Shawlands. While the Georgian exterior is still in good condition, the jaded Victorian interiors are in need of a refurbishment to transform the space into a social hub for the southside community.

The A-listed building is in fact, a rebuilding of the National Bank of Scotland, which in 1847, was located on Queen Street in the city-centre. Each stone used to construct the bank was moved to the building's current location in Shawlands for its conversion to public halls in 1902-03.

 

Engineer A.B. McDonald remodelled the halls to include a green-tiled entrance hall which the architects are referencing as their inspiration for the new interior design. The above CAD-drawing shows plans to extend the existing green tiles throughout the building to accentuate this Victorian period-feature.

The creation of a new emerald-green space comes as good news for local action group Southside Glasgow Heritage Environment Trust (SGHET) who have been spearheading the campaign to restore the halls to their former glory. This local committee were successful in their funding application to the European Enterprise Fund last year, bringing the total budget to conserve this hidden architectural gem to £4.8 million.

The development is part of Glasgow City Council's wider Shawlands Town Centre Action Plan which aims to reinvigorate Shawlands and its surrounds. Locals can look forward to a planned cafe-bar, restaurant, heritage information centre and cultural venue when work is completed after two years. In the meantime, the elaborate exteriors can still be enjoyed including the frieze-work and coat-of-arms, done by John Thomas, the same sculptor who worked on the Houses of Parliament.

National Library Scotland Release Hutton Architecture Drawings

George Henry Hutton must have cut an interesting figure in the late eighteenth century, fascinated as he was by architecture in spite of losing an eye while serving a soldier in the Royal Artillery in the West Indies.

The National Library of Scotland certainly seem to think so and have added documents and drawings of Scottish churches and monuments from Hutton's collection to their digital gallery.

The collection is presented across two volumes and contains over 500 drawings, maps, plans and prints relating mainly to ecclesiastical buildings with a few more depicting castles and other dwellings such as this one showing the ruins of Innerwick Castle in East Lothian. Many of the drawings are by Hutton himself and show a sketchy, graphic style at odds with the picturesque scenes depicted. In some of the featured images the artist is unknown, however thanks to Creative Commons licensing, most can be reproduced, thereby forming a rich image-bank for architecture historians. Short blurbs for each image provide more contextual information.

One of the interesting quirks of the collection is that many of the buildings cited still exist today. Try entering in the name of a historic Scottish building or area into the National Library's search engine to see if Hutton recorded any details of your research area over two hundred years ago.

What's more, links can be made between the collection and GSA Library. The above image for example, entitled 'Part of Balmerino [missing text]' appeared in Volume 1 of Francis Grose's book, 'The Antiquities of Scotland,' a copy of which is held in the GSA Library's Special Collections. Check our thematic guide to rare books written about Scotland if historic architectural illustration and photography inspire your research.

Plans to Demolish B-Listed Building For Commonwealth Development Plans

A 1907 board school designed by architects Thomson & Turnbull is under threat of demolition following plans submitted by Glasgow's Celtic Football Club to replace it with an expanded superstore. The club want to knock down the disused London Road Primary School as part of their plan to regenerate the area around the ground in time for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Included in the plans is the formation of a landscaped avenue paved with inscribed stones which would run from Dalmarnock Station past several key venues towards the football stadium. Due to financial budgets and time constraints, it seems unlikely the club's full plans could be realised before the start of the games, however the avenue is being heralded as a necessary development to make the area more attractive to the influx of visitors expected next year.

London Road Primary is understood to be Glasgow's sole remaining B-listed school and is a fine example of English Baroque with carved ornamental features and Venetian and circular windows in the pedimented end bays. Historic Scotland are bound to object to the proposed plans, however as the school has been unoccupied for several years, the case could well proceed on the basis of the building being structurally unsound. Councillors are in support of the club's plans, perceiving the school as an unnecessary eyesore making it even likelier that the building will eventually be razed. Indeed, it seems that the financial advantages to be gained from redevelopment in the East End will inevitably outweigh the costs of conserving some of its architecture.

Manufacturing Pasts - University of Leicester Learning Resources

A new online resource developed by University of Leicester tells the story of what life was like and how quickly it changed in British industrial cities during the second half of the twentieth century. Manufacturing Pasts is arranged into four major themes: 'Conservation and Urban Regeneration,' 'De-Industrialisation,' 'Factory and Community' and 'Social Life of the Factory.' Each theme links through from the site's main page to a vault of learning resources about the city's industrial history including photographs, maps, architectural drawings, oral history interviews, company publications and newspaper articles.

The great news is that thanks to Creative Commons licencing, the sources are copyright-cleared, easy to access and free to reuse for educational purposes. 

Much like Glasgow, the city of Leicester serves as a strong example of the effects of industrial growth and decline on the transmutable city which challenge architects and urban planners to think imaginatively about the future use of space. This retrospective case study considers the impact of industry on the city and more than that, analyses what happened to the buildings that previously housed and supported Leicester's manufacturing sector. Rather than demolition, can the carcasses of buildings left behind from Leicester's manufacturing past be used to support its commercial future...? 

Discovery Guides

We've recently updated all our guides to make them easier to use and more helpful. You'll find guides to our collections (such as graphic novels or artists' books), finding aids and bibliographies (for particular research topics), info skills guides (for services such as Google and Wikipedia), and support guides in a brand new Discovery Guides section of our website. In addition we've developed new attractive branding to differentiate between different types of guide. Let us know what you think!
http://www2.gsa.ac.uk/library/discovery_guides.html

The Glass-House Community Led Design

They say people in glass-houses shouldn't throw stones but community participation experts 'The Glass-House Community Led Design' have been pitching some weighty ideas around community engagement in urban design since 2006. 

The charitable organisation brings together communities and regeneration professionals to equip both groups with the skills to contribute to urban design projects that benefit local people. The idea is to better inform the design process with the result being "more intelligent, dynamic and sustainable places." And the theory is backed up by practice; the group are actively using their experiences of supporting projects to influence policy and practice around the issue of community led design. Projects have so far included various buildings, spaces, homes and neighbourhoods including the Aviemore Sports Centre Project with collaborative research projects underway at University of Sheffield, University of Birmingham and the Open University.

Follow the links to the group's blog, project showcase and list of useful resources for a directory of regularly updated opinion, project information and publications. Also, look out for touring events which offer the opportunity for everyone with an interest in urban design and community initiatives to share experiences and debate the priorities behind area-planning and redevelopment projects.

Pastmap - Free Interactive Mapping Tool

An interactive map which allows anyone to map Scotland's historic environment online has just been launched by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS). 'Pastmap' consolidates information previously held on five heritage-organisation databases into one multi-layered, online space. Visitors to the website can navigate to their area of interest, zoom in on a section, arrange the information into layers, and click on the map's objects for more information.

The visual nature of the site and it's easy-to-use controls means that it will probably appeal to both those with a professional interest and others who may simply take delight in exploring the archaeological and historic features of their local area. A great way to explore local heritage and architectural landmarks from the comfort of your armchair!

Emotion Recollected in Sustainability - Carbeth's Hideaway Huts

If you go down to the woods today, you're in for a big surprise... that's if like me, you've only just discovered the eldritch charm at Carbeth. The huts made the news when Carbeth Hutters Community Hutters were granted a loan which is helping the community to buy their land.

The development of huts in the area north of Milngavie has existed since 1919. During the second world war, families from Clydebank stayed at Carbeth to escape the bombing of industry on the Clyde. Gradually, more huts were built and a small community was formed. Today, Carbeth is part of The Thousand Huts movement, which aims to promote hutting as a sustainable way of living that gives city-dwellers contact with the countryside. Around 140 self-powered cabins, huts and shacks form the collective, all of which rely on water standpipes, solar panels and wind turbines to sustain the inhabitants. 

In an age of convenience and energy expenditure, Carbeth makes a useful case-study of our relationship with place and how sustainability ethics inevitably stand to influence the future of design. It is intriguing to reflect that the community's original settlers may only have been searching for a calm oasis outside Glasgow when they began hand-building the community 80 years ago. Perhaps unbeknown to them, they were in fact laying the foundations for an eco-friendly ideal which today, is actively supported by people enjoying the same tranquility in the wooded retreat.

Architects such as Torsten Ottesjo show that improvisation and functionality are common concerns in the architecture profession. Surprising that the values of self-reliance and responsibility for fuel-use should take root in communities like Carbeth.

See also artist Frances McCourt's photography works like the one above compiled for an exhibition at Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow.

http://www.carbethhuts.co.uk/

Architecture-Breaking Bugs – when a Dreamliner becomes a Nightmare

The history of computer systems is also the history of bugs, including epic, disastrous bugs that have caused millions of $ in damage and destruction and even death, as well as many other less spectacular but expensive system and project failures. Some of these appear to be small and stupid mistakes, like the infamous Ariane 5 rocket crash, caused by a one-line programming error. But a one-line programming error, or any other isolated mistake or failure, cannot cause serious damage to a large system, without fundamental failures in architecture and design, and failures in management.

Boeing's 787 Dreamliner Going Nowhere
The Economist, Feb 26 2013

These kinds of problems are what Barry Boehm calls “Architecture Breakers”: where a system’s design doesn't hold up in the real world, when you run face-first into a fundamental weakness or a hard limit on what is possible with the approach that you took or the technology platform that you selected.

Architecture Breakers happen at the edges – or beyond the edges – of the design, off of the normal, nominal, happy paths. The system works, except for a “one in a million” exceptional error, which nobody takes seriously until a “once in a million” problem starts happening every few days. Or the system crumples under an unexpected surge in demand, demand that isn't going to go away unless you can’t find a way to quickly scale the system to keep up – and if you can’t, you won’t have a demand problem any more because those customers won’t be coming back. Or what looks like a minor operational problem turns out to be the first sign of a fundamental reliability or safety problem in the system.

Dreamliner is Troubled by Questions about Safety
NY Times, Jan 10, 2013

Finding Architecture Breakers

It starts off with a nasty bug or an isolated operational issue or a security incident. As you investigate and start to look deeper you find more cases, gaping holes in the design, hard limits to what the system can do, or failures that can’t be explained and can’t be stopped. The design starts to unravel as each problem opens up to another problem. Fixing it right is going to take time and money, maybe even going back to the drawing board and revisiting foundational architectural decisions and technology choices. What looked like a random failure or an ugly bug just turned into something much uglier, and much much more expensive.

Deepening Crisis for the Boeing 787
NY Times, Jan 17 2013

What makes these problems especially bad is that they are found late, way past design and even past acceptance testing, usually when the system is already in production and you have a lot of real customers using it to get real work done. This is when you can least afford to encounter a serious problem. When something does go wrong, it can be difficult to recognize how serious it is right away. It can take two or three or more failures before you realize – and accept – how bad things really are and before you see enough of a pattern to understand where the problem might be.

Boeing Batteries Said to Fail 10 Times Before Incident
Bloomberg, Jan 30 2013

By then you may be losing customers and losing money and you’re under extreme pressure to come up with a fix, and nobody wants to hear that you have to stop and go back and rewrite a piece of the system, or re-architect it and start again – or that you need more time to think and test and understand what’s wrong and what your options are before you can even tell them how long it might take and how much it could cost to fix things.

Regulators Around the Globe Ground Boeing 787s
NY Times, Jan 18 2013

What can Break your Architecture?

Most Architecture Breakers are fundamental problems in important non-functional aspects of a system:

• Stability and data integrity: some piece of the system won’t stay up under load or fails intermittently after the system has been running for hours or days or weeks, or you lost critical customer data or you can’t recover and restore service fast enough after an operational failure.
• Scalability and throughput: the platform (language or container or communications fabric or database – or all of them) are beautiful to work with, but can’t keep up as more customers come in, even if you throw more hardware at it. Ask Twitter about trying to scale-out Ruby or Facebook about scaling PHP or anyone who has ever tried to scale-out Oracle RAC.
• Latency – requirements for real-time response-time/deadline satisfaction escalate, or you run into unacceptable jitter and variability (you chose Java as your run-time platform, what happens when GC kicks in?).
• Security: you just got hacked and you find out that the one bug that an attacker exploited is only the first of hundreds or thousands of bugs that will need to be found and fixed, because your design or the language and the framework that you picked (or the way that you used it) is as full of security holes as Swiss cheese.

These problems can come from misunderstanding what an underlying platform technology or framework can actually do – what the design tolerances for that architecture or technology are. Or from completely missing, overlooking, ignoring or misunderstanding an important aspect of the design.

These aren’t problems that you can code your way out of, at least not easily. Sometimes the problem isn't in your code any ways: it’s in a third party platform technology that can’t keep up or won’t stay up. The language itself, or an important part of the stack like the container, database, or communications fabric, or whatever you are depending on for clustering and failover or to do some other magic. At high scale in the real world, almost any piece of software that somebody else wrote can and will fall short of what you really need, or what the vendor promised.

Boeing, 787 Battery Supplier at Odds over Fixes
Wall Street Journal, Feb 27 2013

You’ll have to spend time working with a vendor (or sometimes with more than one vendor) and help them understand your problem, and get them to agree that it’s really their problem, and that they have to fix it, and if they can’t fix it, or can’t fix it quickly enough, you’ll need to come up with a Plan B quickly, and hope that your new choice won’t run into other problems that may be just as bad or even worse.

How to Avoid Architecture Breakers

Architecture Breakers are caused by decisions that you made early and got wrong – or that you didn't make early enough, or didn't make at all. Boehm talks about Architecture Breakers as part of an argument against Simple Design – that many teams, especially Agile teams, spend too much time focused on the happy path, building new features to make the customer happy, and not enough time on upfront architecture and thinking about what could go wrong. But Architecture Breakers have been around a lot longer than Agile and simple design: in Making Software (Chapter 10 Architecting: How Much and When), Boehm goes back to the 1980s when he first recognized these kinds of problems, when Structured Programming and later Waterfall were the “right way” to do things.

Boehm’s solution is more and better architecture definition and technical risk management through Spiral software development: a lifecycle with architecture upfront to identify risk areas, which are then explored through iterative, risk-driven design, prototyping and development in multiple stages. Spiral development is like today’s iterative, incremental development methods on steroids, using risk-based architectural spikes, but with much longer iterative development and technical prototyping cycles, more formal risk management, more planning, more paperwork, and much higher costs.

Bugs like these can’t all be solved by spending more time on architecture and technical risk management upfront – whether through Spiral development or a beefed up, disciplined Agile developmentapproach. More time spent upfront won`t help if you make naïve assumptions about scalability, responsiveness or reliability or security; or if you don’t understand these problems well enough to identify the risks. Architecture Breakers won’t be found in design reviews – because you won’t be looking for something that you don’t know could a problem – unless maybe you are running through structured failure modelling exercises like FMEA (Failure mode and effect analysis) or FMECA (Failure mode, effects and criticality analysis), which force you to ask hard questions, but which few people outside of regulated industries have even heard about.

And Architecture Breakers can't all be caught in testing, even extended longevity/soak testing and extensive fuzzing and simulated failures and fault injection and destructive testing and stress testing – even if all the bugs that are found this way are taken seriously (because these kinds of extreme tests are often considered unrealistic).

You have to be prepared to deal with Architecture Breakers. Anticipating problems and partitioning your architecture using something like the Stability Patterns in Michael Nygard’s excellent book Release It! will at least keep serious run-time errors from spreading and taking an entire system out (these strategies will also help with scaling and with containing security attacks). And if and when you do see a “once in a million” error in reviews or testing or production, understand how serious it can be, and act right away – before a Dreamliner turns into a nightmare.

Spomeniks - Lost Between Sculpture and Architecture

Jan Kempenaer's series of photographic works focusing on Spomeniks, the abstract, concrete monuments punctuating the boundaries of the countries once comprising the former Yugoslavia, is available to view here. Kampenaer's work is preoccupied with the 18th century Picturesque tradition and his photographs of these oddly incongruous structures consider the enforcement of societal rules upon the natural landscape. Out of the many hundreds of Spomeniks commissioned in the years following World War II, most have since been demolished or neglected, their location only discoverable through committed research or spontaneous encounter in the wooded, mountainous regions where they were constructed. The isolation of these once magnificent emblems of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia raises interesting questions around the function of architecture which could be thought of as ideologically defunct. Should the Spomeniks be confined to history or should their use be reconsidered, as perhaps Kempenaer's photographs intend.

Living Architecture Takes Root in Oban

Think of Oban, the sleepy port town in the Scottish Western Highlands, and you'll probably call to mind McCaig's Tower, the folly overlooking the bay that was commissioned by its namesake in 1897 to keep the town's local stonemasons in work. Now, thanks to the feats of German architect Marcel Kalberer, head of the firm Sanfte Strukturen, the town can finally lay claim to two sculptures with real architectural clout.

Nestled in the gardens of the Dunollie Castle estate, the 22ft woven tower and dome are made entirely of live willow branches, sourced from Glasgow. The branches will continue to grow over the coming months, thereby altering the form of the natural structures. Kalberer refers to his designs as "living architecture" due to the botanical and ecological implications behind the architecture and the fact that all of his structures are brought to life by a community of volunteers. The tower, for example, took a week to build and will change gradually with the passing of the seasons. The theory behind the process is to show the value of socially-sustainable buildings and encourage human co-existence with the natural world.

Karlberer has designed a number of green cathedrals, towers and domes from willow branches including 'Auerworld Palace' in Germany which is the world's largest living structure of its kind. The as yet unnamed works on show in Oban are the first examples to be shown in Britain, built on the proceeds of a £5,900 grant from Creative Scotland. Visit them for free if you're making any visits over to the Western Isles, or for more information and further examples of Karlberer's work, read on at the link below:

http://www.sanftestrukturen.de/Weidenbau/Weidenbau.html

Gillespie, Kidd & Coia on Radio 4

There are six days to catch up on a Radio 4 programme exploring the church architecture of Isi Metzstein and Andrew MacMillan, the innovative partners for Glasgow firm Gillespie Kidd & Coia during the second part of the 20th century, and the pioneers of a contemporary form of European architecture.

In post-war Britain, the Catholic Church drew on the visionary talents of Metzstein and MacMillan as a means of constructing places of worship which would meet its ambitions to expand Catholicism in Scotland. While the religious renaissance may never have been fully realised, the creative partnership between Metzstein and MacMillan flourished, culminating in their masterpiece at St Peter's Seminary at Cardross. Once rising statuesque out of the landscape, the site now lies derelict, abandoned in 1980, just 14 years after completion, due to structural changes in the church. The site is still regarded as hallowed land by many architects and enthusiasts, and there is still belief that it will, eventually, be conserved as a ruin.

In this half-hour Radio 4 programme, Jonathan Glancey discusses Scotland's landscape and the country's religious element to discover more about the lives of two of Glasgow's most extraordinarily talented architects. Listen in at the link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rqnf3