Simon Sadler’s Archigram book defined the british group’s vision a “sublime world of pure servicing”. Amazon’s the company that is making the radical idea of buildingless architecture a concrete reality. Though its One click shopping, physical lockers where to pick up deliveries, next day and free shipping with Prime, grocery with Amazon Fresh and possibly even drones’ delivery with Prime Air, Amazon is slowly superseding not just mom and pop stores, but any kind of physical shop. I’ve been nurturing this idea of a connection between an avant-garde architecture group and one of the biggest technological company since the Utopia Dweller proposal with AM-FL. So seeking to what extent David Green’s poem “I have the desire for the built-environment to allow me to do my own thing” paired with Amazon’s outspoken obsession to satisfy their customers, I’ve just finished reading Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store”.

Here’s some stuff I found of interest from the book, highly unrelated to any of the above.

  • Bezos was at Montessori school.
  • Amazon’s first name was Cadabra - it was changed since it sounded too much like Cadaver.
  • Shel Kaphan, the first amazon engineer, was one Steward Brand friend and Bezos is partnering with Brand with the project of Clock of the Long Now.
  • Jeff Bezos requires his senior executives to read “Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb and actually mentions to the Author his concerns over the book, in particular regarding what Taleb calls Narrative Fallacy.
  • Brad Stone might in fact have fallen into that narrative fallacy trap, according to what Jeff’s wife Mackenzie Bezos writes on her review of the book here.

  • Beyond criticism about the man’s temper, long-term employer Rick Dalzell’s description about Jeff Bezos are possibly my favorite throughout the whole book:

    “Jeff does a couple of things better than anyone I’ve ever worked for. He embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don’t engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time. The second is that he is not tethered by conventional thinking. What is amazing to me is that he is only bound by the laws of physics. He can’t change those. Everything else he views as open for discussion.”