Today we visited the Aga Khan Museum here in Toronto, which is a museum dedicated to the arts of Islamic civilizations. I had been outside the building before but this was my first time inside and my first time seeing some of the collections.

Here is the main entrance:

Here is a photo looking the opposite way over one of the reflection ponds:

The museum was designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and was completed in 2014. 

The site area is approximately 70,000 square meters and the building itself is approximately 11,600 square meters. Maki won the Pritzker Prize in 1993.

Here is the building’s interior courtyard, which was one of my favorite parts:

The glass is patterned with the Islamic eight pointed star. But since the symbol is typically represented by two overlapping squares, the patterning was placed on two different sides of the double pane glass. Or at least that’s my guess as to why they did it that way.

Lastly, here is the Bellerive Room:

It was designed to be a contemplative room that could, on occasion, also host intimate events and performances. Note the shadows being cast by the screens in front of the windows.

If you haven’t yet been to the Aga Khan Museum it is worth a visit, even if you just walk the formal gardens surrounding it.

Benedict Evans just published a great post on his blog about “Tesla, software and disruption.” I recommend a full read. In it, he tries to answer whether Tesla is really “the new iPhone” and if it will be as disruptive to the car landscape as some/many people think.

In his line of thinking, electric (as opposed to an ICE vehicle) feels a lot more like a sustaining innovation, rather than a disruptive innovation. In other words, it something that incumbents will be able to incorporate. So it will not change the “basis of competition.”

The more critical aspect is instead autonomy. Here are two snippets from the piece:

All of this takes us to autonomy. Electric is compelling but will probably be a commodity, whereas Tesla’s improvements on top of electric may not be commodities but are not necessarily decisive. Autonomy changes the world in profound ways (I wrote about this here), and it’s a fundamentally new technology that doesn’t look at all like a commodity. And Tesla is doing this, too. Sort of.

Today we visited the Aga Khan Museum here in Toronto, which is a museum dedicated to the arts of Islamic civilizations. I had been outside the building before but this was my first time inside and my first time seeing some of the collections.

Here is the main entrance:

Here is a photo looking the opposite way over one of the reflection ponds:

The museum was designed by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and was completed in 2014. 

The site area is approximately 70,000 square meters and the building itself is approximately 11,600 square meters. Maki won the Pritzker Prize in 1993.

Here is the building’s interior courtyard, which was one of my favorite parts:

The glass is patterned with the Islamic eight pointed star. But since the symbol is typically represented by two overlapping squares, the patterning was placed on two different sides of the double pane glass. Or at least that’s my guess as to why they did it that way.

Lastly, here is the Bellerive Room:

It was designed to be a contemplative room that could, on occasion, also host intimate events and performances. Note the shadows being cast by the screens in front of the windows.

If you haven’t yet been to the Aga Khan Museum it is worth a visit, even if you just walk the formal gardens surrounding it.

Benedict Evans just published a great post on his blog about “Tesla, software and disruption.” I recommend a full read. In it, he tries to answer whether Tesla is really “the new iPhone” and if it will be as disruptive to the car landscape as some/many people think.

In his line of thinking, electric (as opposed to an ICE vehicle) feels a lot more like a sustaining innovation, rather than a disruptive innovation. In other words, it something that incumbents will be able to incorporate. So it will not change the “basis of competition.”

The more critical aspect is instead autonomy. Here are two snippets from the piece:

All of this takes us to autonomy. Electric is compelling but will probably be a commodity, whereas Tesla’s improvements on top of electric may not be commodities but are not necessarily decisive. Autonomy changes the world in profound ways (I wrote about this here), and it’s a fundamentally new technology that doesn’t look at all like a commodity. And Tesla is doing this, too. Sort of.