Form is a verb
Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc is credited with articulating the
first coherent method for developing a design proposal for an architectural
project based on careful analysis of the user’s or client’s requirements and
activities.21 This step-by-step method for approaching the brief or
program is set out in his Histoire d’une
maison published in 1873. The founding premise is that the design of the
project must be shaped by an engagement with the client’s needs through
rational investigation and not shaped entirely by fanciful imaginings on the
part of the architect. Once a program has been determined and reviewed a plan
can be prepared in response. By this means the building is designed from the
inside out. That is the volumes and arrangement have been driven by the
articulation of a program. Structural and regulatory issues complete the formal
arrangement. This notion of designing from the inside out has a long tradition
in France and stands in opposition to the very formal, ordered geometric
dictates of Italian Renaissance architecture typified by the work of Andrea
Palladio and Leone Battista Alberti. While not articulated as a discrete
program, the design of French châteaux and hôtels had evolved in lockstep with
an evermore sophisticated social program. Rather than seeing architectural
structure as a figure in a landscape as in the Italian Renaissance model, French
architectural thinking was driven by a notion of the interior space as the
figure with the building envelope as the ground.22
“In the last decades of the fourteenth century a new richness
appeared, and along with it a new feeling for comfort and intimacy. A magnate
as powerful as the Duc de Berry could indulge in this to the full, but the
development was by no means confined to him. It was stimulated, perhaps, by the
twenty years of virtual peace between the two halves of the Hundred Years War.
Its most remarkable manifestation was the way in which the personal
accommodation of great people became more elaborate. Monarchs, bishops and
grands seigneurs set in train a development that then started to percolate down
the social scale. This improved accommodation involved several rooms,
collectively known as the ‘logis’ of whoever occupied them [their English
equivalent was similarly known as ‘lodgings’]. A great person’s logis contained
at least two chambres as well as a garderobe, generous provision of latrines,
and sometimes a private oratory and a study, or ‘estude’.”23
Space is the
figure
French social etiquette and a preoccupation with
cultural forms saw French architecture respond to and evolve around
well-defined programs, giving rise to complex and varied plan-forms and
interior experiences. Modular clusters of rooms could be repeated in larger
houses where accommodation for multiple parallel programs was required. In the
early seventeenth century the ‘appartement’ arrived as a self-contained private
accommodation module, whereby complex mini programs could be nested and
repeated within a larger program.24 As French society found new forms of intellectual and social
engagement, so new rooms and spaces appeared in response to developments in the
art of conversation and the role of the hostess; the cabinet, the ruelle, the
alcove [from the Spanish alcoba or alcova]. The size, separation and
orientation or ordering of these rooms was dictated by the type of interaction
desired, the group size and appropriate level of intimacy. The evolution of
French fashionable society provided an engine for the development of French
architectural planning. The design of private houses became the development of
spatial sequences that supported, stimulated and inspired social interaction.
French architects dissected the social ecosystem of
their society and responded with assigned spaces corresponding to these
interaction states. The rooms and zones that arose were the salon, the oratory,
logis, chambre ‘de parement’, the avante-cour, the basse-cour, salle cuisine,
salon, library, chambre de parade, salle de compaigne and the salle a manger
plus an elaborate assortment of technical and service support rooms. The
linchpin was the grand staircase. Prior to this Chateaux consisted solely of a
tower fortification, a chapel and a grande salle, which constituted the entry,
eating and sleeping space. In the new chateaux the logis, or lodging rooms, a
private suite of rooms, evolved to contain an outer chambre ‘de parement’, an inner
chambre ‘de retrait’, a garderobe, latrine, cabinet, cabinette de toilet,
boudoir, private oratory and study. The bed in the centre of the ‘parement’ was
not for sleeping in. Beds were status symbols like Bentleys and Lamborghinis.
They were there to look good. These space became reception rooms or ante-rooms,
but retained their ambiguous status – a bedroom that is not a bedroom- by the
retaining their ornamental beds.
By the 1600s the chambre and its appurtences were
increasingly personalised, the provision of anti-chambres and galleries, the
enrichment and increased importance of the cabinet were to be institutionalised
in the apartment with its insinuation of separation and privacy. Each space was
coded for a different degree of privacy and types of activity. The space
between the bed and the wall in the cabinet even had a name; the ruelle, and it
formed an inner more intimate space within the room. Later came the alcove, a
room within a room, a small portion of the chambre divided of by an arch, an idea
taken from Spanish architecture.
With the apartment came “new forms of social
relationships and new types of individual sensibility. They wanted more than
great dinners, dancing and story telling. They were developing the art of the
conversation as the interaction of lively minds to develop their own intellects
and imaginations.” These
conversations could be wide-ranging, witty, political, lively and flirtatious.
In the late Seventeenth Century French society developed the concept of the
dinner party and the hostess, who could create and curate such a social life in
her own home, and the idea of personal relationships which were more than just
sexual, though sex could play a part. With the apartment the salon not the
grand staircase became the linchpin of French life.
The apartment evolved into a two storey space with the
double height salon or chambre-de parade, the larger social space leading out
into the garden on the lower floor and the cabinet and chambre above. Finally
social life had taken over from the centrality of the earlier eating rooms.
Conversation, games, music and sumptuous dinner parties with carefully selected
guests and a commanding view of the garden ruled. So much so that the word
salon came to mean a social event as well as a room. “In the eighteenth century
what came to be called a salon was called a ‘societe’, the custom of particular
women being at home for their particular circle of friends on a particular
day”.
Urban
In his book, Court
and Garden, Michael Dennis argues that near the end of the seventeenth
century with the designing of the Baroque Hôtel form French architects had
established a very sophisticated vocabulary of planning; local symmetry,
re-centering, figural space, architectural promenade, designed discontinuity
and hierarchical levels of poché.25 [Poché – to blacken in (solid
structural areas on a plan). This added to the reading of the plan. Thicker
walls emphasised the presence of wider spaces requiring greater roof spans and
support. ] Dennis argues that this sophisticated level of spatial strategising
and programming underscored the approach of modernist architects like Le
Corbusier, who talked about designing architecture from within and whose plans
exhibit the benefits of being generated by an advanced engagement with program.
This French model, while being driven by a formal sensibility derived from
fashion and social conduct, was directed to creating an integrated environment
that acted to facilitate and contain a process. The Hôtel developed as a new form
as society opened up. The Hotel was a plan form arranged around an exterior
court. It was produced from the residential square introduced from Italy and
the Renaissance urban system of continuous building. This approach articulates
space verses the modern system of articulated objects in a continuous
landscape. The Hôtel was developed through the plan as the generator, derived
from the French models of asymmetry, articulation, figural rooms, architectural
promenade, hierarchical figure-ground relationships and poché. These all
exploited the principle of discontinuity rather than the Palladian ideals of
free standing unified symmetry. This turned it into a highly sophisticated
instrument of urbanism. In the Renaissance, space was the medium of the age, the
principal means of articulating a new view of the universe. Hôtels are urban
party wall buildings. Hôtels can only be experienced sequentially, courtyard to
courtyard to gallery etc. They generally avoid axial continuity. The plans
generated fractures or non alignments to allow ‘re-centring’ at different
stages of your journey to the next space, court or garden. This created a
localising of your orientation often centred on an apartment.
The interest in residential squares saw an interest in
public/private boundaries and exchanges. The square was a kind of cour
d’honneur, an urban and social stabiliser, a great outdoor room; the community
living room. The buildings formed by it are a kind of habitable poché. The
space is the defining anchor and the figure.
L’art de la distribution is the functional arrangement
of the spatial planning and generated more specific purpose rooms. French
facades combine Italian Renaissance horizontality with Gothic verticality and
have more widow area, indicating a greater interior presence and potential
domestic freedom. The Rococo emphasised private life, intrigue and personal
experience as the highest aims of life. By the reign of Louis 14th a
complete revolution in social life occurred focused on interest in individuals,
individual relationships, abstraction, empathy and conversation.
While the modernists, including Le Corbusier reverted to
the anti-urban Italian ‘temple in the landscape model’, it was in the domino
house frame that Le Corbusier began to return to the French themes of connected
spaces, whose form was driven by occupation not the perspectival gaze. Le
Corbusier refined this idea in the free plan, “The house could be like an
automobile: a simple envelope containing the origins of a plan in a free
state”. The plan can be in turmoil, in a state of turbulence. This was followed
by the free façade, making it possible to directly relate and unify inside and
out. In the free plan and facades the asymmetry and re-centring can be seen
along with the rooms becoming areas with continually shifting relationships,
like cubism’s fractured and partial images reassembled into new and ambivalent
relationships. One of the great tragedies of the C20 has been the collapse of
public space. We need architecture that makes public space as well as consuming
it. In the pre-modern city space takes precedence over objects. Streets and
squares are sacrosanct, a series of discrete rooms, articulated by thick,
occupied walls. In many respects the later American land art movement captures an
‘urban’ social desire for a curated, intense, collective and dynamic space, a
space that never featured in American architecture, with the exception of the
loosely bounded college campus.
Convention
In his book Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays,
Robin Evans examines the origins of a number of deeply institutionalised
conventions in architecture and urban planning. He discusses the social rather
than physical or logistical nature of their origins. These conventions are so
central to most architectural thinking that they are never questioned or
re-examined, like the idea of the corridor or the suburban home. These
conventions turn out to be much more ephemeral than generally understood and
often the product of social processes and thinking which have long since been
sublimated within the convention and no longer able to be easily addressed. As
an example, Evans identifies the corridor as first appearing in architecture in
1597 at Beaufort House in Chelsea, England, designed by John Thorpe.38
Entirely unlike colonnades, entry staircases, landings and other flow spaces,
the corridor is a device for removing traffic from rooms. The logic of the
corridor was to separate the inhabitants in terminal rooms allowing them the
distinctly Enlightenment luxury of contemplation and developing an inner life
rather than building their personalities through the endless chaotic social
rough and tumble you would expect to experience in the interconnected matrix of
an Italian Renaissance palazzo. The corridor was a product of the intellectual
and social condition of the Enlightenment, not rational planning, structural or
economic or even artistic considerations, according to Evans.
Evans applies a similar form of analysis to the evolution of the
garden suburb, seeing it rooted in Victorian moral and ethical concerns and the
emergence of socio-graphical mapping techniques. The suburb and the detached
single family home are not ancient time-honoured archetypes, absolute and
unchanging. They are in fact quite new and while highly desirable for all sorts
of reasons, the notion that they represent an absolute formula for the design
and urban planning of our housing and the welfare of our populous is ludicrous.
The nineteenth century London rookeries and squalor of Victorian England
provided the ammunition for a philanthropic and moral crusade to index moral
degeneration, crime and poverty with urban population density, living
conditions and living arrangements to reveal the intimate bond between urban
density and moral degradation. These ideas fuelled a Victorian desire for
change in domestic arrangements.
‘Where there are bad homes there are bad hearts and bad deeds …’
In the 1840s domestic architecture was for the first time deployed
directly against the twin evils of vice and ill health in towns. Charles
Booth’s Descriptive Maps of London of 1889, overlaying housing typologies and
the relative degeneracy of the occupants amounted to the conception of a moral
geography. ‘The layout of the house mapped out the moral condition of the
family and the street layout mapped the moral condition of the community.’
Model house projects where developed to circumscribe the movements and
intercourse between occupants to reform and improve their moral condition,
creating a more isolated, insular domesticity. These created whole new housing
typologies. Three became the magic number for the number of family bedrooms as
it ensured the essential moral separation and secrecy. This fundamental logic
was then extended to the street, ensuring appropriate separation between the
houses and house and street, giving a moral structure to public space. From
this logic the suburb emerges as a figure and ground composition where
discrete, articulated building objects sit in a continuous landscape, a moral
moat.39
Robin Evans’ critique suggests a way to change conventions. Since
they are not set and wrought of an immutable logic they can be addressed and
unpacked for discussion and possible change. What Evans’ approach implicitly
suggests is that by a process of such an address, an arcane and disciplinary
specific phenomenon like a corridor can become the subject of discussion
centred on social processes and systems. He has rendered architectural
conventions as social artefacts. Such a discourse can be applied to any design
element of an architectural project, reviewed and, where it was useful,
changed. By this technique changes can be instigated from discussion about the
processes and any change will be preceded by an understanding on the part of
the client stakeholders that they had participated in and ratified the
reasoning behind the change. This provides a valuable platform for questioning
existing structures and operational systems from individual user’s
perspectives.
Metastasis
In the book, Your Private Sky,
Richard Buckminster Fuller describes how the interaction of social convention
and technological innovation can generate the possibility of change, driven by
changed social processes. He recounts the condition of old mid-western American
farm settlements. They consisted of many buildings, each with a specific
function: barn, stables, corncribs, wet fermenting ensilage, woodshed, cold
cellar etc. Each required elaborate and time-consuming maintenance. With the
advent of efficient farm machinery in the early twentieth century, the American
farmer
“finally had time enough before twilight to sit and look at the
scenery and he built porches around his house. As he began to have more and
more time, he began to put screens on the porches. With ever more time, he
began to put glass windows on the porches. Sitting on his porches, he watched
other people go by. Then came the automobile, which in effect put wheels under
his glassed-in front porch, so instead of waiting to see people go by he drove down
the street to see the people. In a very real sense the automobile was part of
the house, broken off, like hydra cells going off on a life of their own. The
young people who used to court in the parlour, then on the glassed-in front
porch, now began to do their courting in the automobile, or the porch on
wheels. Today the young people do their courting in their parlour on wheels,
driving it to the drive-in theatre. Because we are conditioned to think of the
house as static, we fail to realise that the automobile is as much a part of
the house as is the addition of the woodshed.” 45
By this description the interior design and architecture are defined
by the users’ patterns of behaviour, their rituals and social and technical
processes. The architectural framing cannot be circumscribed by the activities
of a particular discipline or the limits of a particular technological
platform. The patterns of use can jump unpredictably from one technology
platform or territory of a particular design discipline to any other. In
engaging with designing for change this lack of a boundary for defining how an
activity might evolve is a critical consideration. It reinforces the logic of a
transdisciplinary approach and the very dynamic impact that a social model has
on defining the practice of designing space. With the clarity of an historical
observation it raises the intertwined and unstable character of the design
problem that emerges when you frame architecture is an event.
Network
Actor Network Theory or ANT. ANT was developed by John Law at
Lancaster University42 and Bruno Latour at Ecole Nationale
Supérieure des Mines in Paris.43 This model proposed a highly
complex forensic model for social and technical processes. They argued that the
key actors or drivers operating within any system could not be superficially
determined. Often the most significant factor shaping a system could actually
be one that is extraneous to the acknowledged model. The success of a biscuit
factory might be its proximity to a river which creates the perfect humidity
for crunchy but firm biscuits as they dry. The factory is moved to another
location and every detail is replicated and yet the biscuits are no longer as
good. Until someone detects the minute but profound significance of the river,
which plays no obvious role in the factory’s operation, no amount of re-jigging
the new production line will remedy the problem. Even the most extraneous
information may hold vital clues as to how a system or network operates and how
it will behave or how it might be possible to meaningfully change it for the
better. For a social process the best strategy is to interview everybody,
including the cleaners, and build up the richest picture of the relational
dynamics at work. This idea is extended in the Social Construction of
Technology model. This provides a way to view any project as a social
construction, one that could be best understood by the relational dynamics of
the actors. The social dynamic makes the system what it is. The physical space
can reflect, assist or hinder the social dynamic but the principal weight of
the system is in that social dynamic.44 This gives us a framework
for abstract social systems that allows us to go about constructing models of
them, to understand them, represent them, propose changes as new designs and
then prototype these designs in a system and process-focused way. This gives us
the structure to develop a social prototyping method suitable for applying to
the design of architectural projects where innovation and change was required.
Of key significance is the requirement to recognise, map and then to prototype
social processes as well as technology innovations and that architecture can be
modelled as a primarily social and event-based discipline. The design process
itself is an actor, as is the technology, along with change and the idea of
innovation.
Active envelope
As spatial designers we are set designers, orchestrators of
rehearsals, dramaturgs and coaches. We write and study scripts. We assemble and
advise ensembles of actors. We identify and shape roles. We build theatre sets
for our clients to explore, role-play in and acquaint themselves with
activities and technologies. The process is dramatic. This focus on the process
of architectural design as one of engaging in shaping a dynamic or fluid social
artefact. It raises the issue of how we perceive or understand the territory of
interior design and architecture itself. The emerging physical characteristics
are not so much formal, linguistic devices developed as static, absolute
envelopes. They can evolve from the dynamic of the design process that develops
around fabricating the new social artefact, the new system and the network of
actors. Interior design and architecture are evolving as a container for the
action. However, it is also an actor and it was not passive. At Crowd we are
interested in new roles for architecture to inform or enhance the experience
and performance of the constructed environment. My own conception about how
architecture ought to perform or respond to the demands of the project and the
user are primarily shaped by the work of the English architect Cedric Price and
the Czechoslovakian sceneographer Joseph Svododa.
Gottfried Semper, the nineteenth-century German architect, and
Marshall McLuhan, the twentieth century communication academic, both see
architectural space as defined by an active envelope. They suggest that
architecture’s principal significance is vested in the surfaces and they
suggest a theoretical platform from which to explore and push for the
introduction of new digital communication technologies into our design
thinking. In The Medium is the Massage;
Marshall McLuhan observes:
“Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active
processes which are invisible.”03
McLuhan believed that the multiple and mobile vantage points from
which we view our surroundings blinds us to their operative impact. He sees
this as a consequence of our Renaissance-derived perspectival framing of
relationships, one that backgrounds the more ubiquitous actors. Gottfried
Semper, the German architect and art theoretician who had demonstrated the
polychromatic nature of classical architecture in the 1830s, proposed that the
art of building should be understood through the principle of clothing. He saw
the meaning and significance of architecture as being bound up in its surface
not its structure. For Semper the solid form in architecture acted as a support
for the ornamental surface. He believed that the origins of architecture lay in
the placement of the textile ornament followed by the development of the
structure to support it. In Surface
Consciousness, Mark Taylor observes:
“Locating architecture as a textile art in which seamed – together
textile walls envelop and wrap to give spatial enclose, Semper suggests that
architecture ‘turns out to be nothing more than texture’”.04
Such a model naturally engages with cultural and operative models of
architecture where the building acts as a wrapper of the contained functions
and events, but it is also inevitably an active part of those events. Its
surfaces and presence are being read by the users as part of a total
experience. The surfaces and surface treatments or articulations become central
to the contribution of the building and of architecture. Semper’s model
situates architecture in a dynamic cultural system, intertwined and dependant
on many other cultural vectors. Its forms are bound up in complex conventions
which it plays back as part of an active cultural process.05 This
model places the focus on social processes and events, albeit invested in the
fabric of the spatial envelope.
Curate
In 1993 Martin Pawley, the then editor of World Architecture, published an essay titled ‘Condition Zero’ by
Nigel Gilbert in 1993. He framed the communicative potential of architecture
from the perspective of contemporary information technology where information
and experience are fused in a dynamic package.
“Using the language of IT, architecture can be redefined as a
control system for our experience of the world, filtering out the unwelcome and
celebrating the desired. Looked at this way, it is true that architecture has
always been in the business of creating ‘realities’ for societies that are
inherently ‘artificial’ – the transformation being effected via form as mass
and structure.” 07
Gilbert sees that electronic media can effect many of the
experience-shaping roles of traditional architecture. He identifies the power
and pervasive expediency of communications technology as bringing an
‘ephemeralisation’ to the technology used for the shaping of experiences and
definition of environments. Ephemeralisation was a term coined by Buckminster
Fuller to describe the imperative of miniaturisation and enhanced performance
that technological progress pursues, inevitably reducing the overall physical
presence of any maturing technology. The augmentation of a material spatial
infrastructure with a digital or communications-based technology is described
as ‘augmented reality’ or ‘mixed reality’ in the emerging language of
information technology. The increasing compactness and robustness of digital
technologies is making it easier to blend these media into the fabrication of
the physical environment. Much in the way that the solar-powered rear
projection stained-glass window screens of Gothic cathedrals act as the
information and content centrepieces of those spaces, so there is the potential
for contemporary media to play a role in articulating the surfaces of our own
architecture. Often cited contemporary examples of mixed reality environments
are the busy intersections of some of the main roads in downtown Tokyo, such as
the street crossing above Shibuya train station. Here every available building
surface has been covered in very large format digital video screens. These are
used mainly to play advertising content. Some are linked into the mobile phone
network and can display content requested and even generated by passers-by in
the street below.08 These are extraordinary but shambolic spaces
without a specific design program other than the commercial pressure to exploit
the most visible available advertising spaces. A mixed-reality environment sees
information added from virtual communication networks to a physical
environment. The user’s sense of presence is not transferred out of the
physical space, unlike the experiences designed as virtual realities. Depending
on the technologies used in a mixed reality environment the user may feel a
greater sense of immersion or a sense of an extended field of action, with the
provision of new tools to act on the space or with other users. Proponents of
mixed-reality architecture believe that it presents very powerful and intuitive
ways of navigating space and social networks describing them as furnishing
space with data.09 The potential for these technologies to add to
content, coherence, experience or richness to space has been a source of
continual inspiration and interest for our practice as a technological approach
to develop or design spaces in response to a program or script. The
availability and capacity of these communication technologies to deliver
content in a rich and carefully articulated way while being affordable is
gradually growing.
Extended
Organism
Biology provides us with a powerful model to frame the
spatial boundary or envelope with the idea of the exchange boundary. These are
boundary conditions or membranes generated by organisms or insects seeking to
extend their physiological condition. Extended organisms exert adaptive control
over the flows of energy and matter across their physical boundaries. It is what the boundary does that makes the
organism distinctive. It is not a thing. It is a process. An exchange boundary is actively permeable. In modifying
its environment for adaptive properties, an organism confers a degree of
‘livingness’ to its apparently inanimate surroundings. Such animals have two
physiologies: one internal and one external resulting in an adaptive
modification of the environment. In earthworms for example, the result is the
stimulation of growth in sediment, a form of gardening or ranching. As such
extended organisms are producers as well as consumers, transforming their
environments. The process is opportunistic as it replaces lengthy evolutionary
‘retooling’ with rapid co-opting of the surrounding environment to perform
complex ‘organ-like’ behaviour. Such a model, like molecular biology, unifies
living and inanimate worlds.
In the language of thermodynamics, enveloped by an
exchange boundary, an organism is at the centre of a field of potential energy.
Organisms are moments of lower entropy, constructing orderliness internally and
disorder externally. Order and energy are stored internally. The structural
attributes of a good exchange surface require a ratio of surface over thickness
to be as large as possible, a fractal surface, like a fractal coastline,
distending the membrane in both directions to enhance efficiency, like coral
reefs. The boundary becomes an exchange amplifier. Earth worms exploit and
amplify the redox potential gradient in undisturbed mud around them extending
the rich Edaphic soil layer by changing the particle size and hydraulic
capacity of the soil. By investing energy in building and ventilating a burrow
the worm activates a much larger flow of energy. The burrow acts as a
transistor based structure, as the worm activates a much larger energy flow and
a metabolic rectifier that selectively impedes or allows a flow of oxidants and
nutrients in one direction and preventing waste products from flowing back in
the other way.
Similarly we can look at buildings as processes of
exchange and flow. A building is a type of circuit, reorganising order, energy
and climate along with social order. An internalised physiology has increased
reliability and flexibility. What kind of organism might a building be? What is
its ‘abstract’ organismal function, its role as an external organ for the users
and then its own ‘externalisation – what does it exchange with the greater
environment? How does it function? What does it produce? How can it be tuned to
amplify its effectiveness and delivery.
Pavilion
At the 1970 Osaka Expo, the first Asian-hosted incarnation of a
World’s Fair, Pepsi Cola funded an exhibition project entitled Pavilion. It was
a space designed by artists, engineers and musicians to function as an
experimental media-driven environment where each visitor could participate in
creating their own unique experience. Conceived as a software-generated
environment by the group Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., this project
came very close to realising the performative potential of earlier conceptual
projects like Cedric Price’s Fun Palace. Billy Klüver, the president of E.A.T.
and the executive coordinator of the project, described it as a ‘living,
responsive environment’.35 It represented a new form of theatre
space which completely surrounded the audience. With Pepsi’s support, the
project represented a unique opportunity for the funding of essentially
experimental technological installations that were designed to create a
unified, dynamic spatial experience for the visitor. Kenzo Tange and Arata
Isozaki, principal architect and master planner respectively of the Osaka Expo,
had set an agenda for the Expo that it should embrace a dynamic software focus
rather than an exhibition of hardware, as all of the previous fairs had. They
had been particularly struck by the multi-screen projection display of the
Czechoslovakian pavilion at 1967 Montreal Expo, designed by Joseph Svoboda.
Tange and his team had created, with their particular vision, the perfect
environment for experimental and performative architecture. From the autonomous
mobile floats and the optical laser systems to the exterior fog sculpture, the
Pavilion project sought to marry emerging technologies with rich architectural
experiences.
As a performative architectural space it was a dynamic,
reconfigurable environment that could be controlled mechanically and digitally.
The envelope, air quality, soundscape lighting and imagery were all
programmable and ‘playable’ by the building designers and the building users.
The initial concern of the artists who designed the Pavilion was that the
quality of the experience of the visitor should include choice, responsibility,
freedom and participation. The space was not didactic. The visitor was
encouraged, as an individual, to explore the environment and compose his/her
own experience through an engagement with new machines and new processes. It
presents a change in attitude away from concern for the object towards human motivation
and involvement, interest and excitement. The Pavilion was a living responsive
environment, theatre conceived as a total instrument, using every available
technology in which the accumulated experience of all of the programmers
expanded and enriched the possibilities of the space. The software and behaviour
was as important as the hardware.
As such Pavilion was an enabling space, a space of
production as well as consumption for the users. Pavilion was conceived as a
‘world without boundaries.’ The idea was to move beyond the linear didactic
control of traditional theatre, being told when and where to sit, what to do
and see, instead to create an experience that the spectator actively
participates in rather than being an audience. An environment where visitors
create their own experience. The visitor becomes the show. Pavilion is
non-static, ephemeral, emphasising the concrete reality of the here and now.
Art is perceived as an active agent for social change. Pavilion moves beyond
repeated predictable cycles of behaviour into an electronic state of flux, a
fluid and protean shape shifting change, an environmental, performing
instrument. Like jazz, it was very American, a specifically democratic
interchange and improvisational conversation. It demands individual
participation and thought.
Crater
Generally the exploration of these ideas remains in the laboratory
or the art gallery, in the work of artists like Nam June Paik, James Turrell
and Bruce Nauman and at research facilities like the MIT Media Lab. Here there
is an emerging group of practitioners engaged in exploring the potential of
this fusion for architectural practice. This work is being documented in a
number of ‘weblogs’ or ‘blogs’. These include ‘Interactive Architecture Dot
Org’, hosted by Ruairi Glynn37, currently studying at the Bartlett
School of Architecture, University College London; ‘Media architecture’, hosted
by Gernot Tscherteu38, a software interface designer based in
Vienna, and ‘Urban Screens’ hosted by Mirjam Struppek39, an urbanist
and researcher based in Berlin. Much of the work documented specifically
explores the possibilities of interactive and performative technologies in
creating spatial experiences. The work is of interest as it forms a platform
for experimentation and investigation into the possibilities of creating
technologically augmented spatial design solutions, driven by the significance
of social processes and the opportunities emerging from communications-based
technology. While this work informs a kind of strategy menu it is usually very
simple at the level of the scripting or organisation of activities that
constitute the aggregated experiences. In 2006 I went to see the as yet
unfinished and un-opened land-art project Roden Crater by the artist James
Turrell. Roden Crater
is a cinder cone type
of volcanic cone created
from an extinct volcano,
with a remaining interior volcanic crater.
It is located northeast of the city of Flagstaff in northern Arizona, United States. The artist James Turrell, for his Land art project, acquired
the 400,000-year-old, 4.8 km wide crater site. Since 1972 Turrell
has been transforming the inner cone of the crater into a massive naked-eye
observatory, designed specifically for the viewing and experiencing sky-light,
solar, and celestial phenomena. It was due to open this year.
In
many ways Roden Crater may be seen in the tradition of many
archaeo-astronomical sites, such as El Karnak in Egypt. “Turrell not only wants
to direct people’s attention to the sky, but also allow them to ‘see their own
seeing’, as ‘active’, not ‘passive’ observers. Turrell says “When you are
there, it has visions, qualities and a universe of possibilities”. The space
acts as a kind of gigantic astronomic camera bringing the complex cosmic
ecology into an intimate space of human space of habitation.
Nothing
More recently this challenge has been taken up by Expo 02. In 2002 I
visited the Swiss National Exhibition Expo 02, a nationally focused celebration
of Swiss industry, creativity and culture. The exhibition appeared to have
modelled itself on the 1970 Osaka Expo, with a strong focus on experimentation
and the design of unique experiences rather than elaborate corporate messages.
International architects including Diller and Scofidio, Jean Nouvel and Coop
Himmelb(l)au participated, creating appealing if somewhat less radical
architectural experiences. Diller and Scofidio’s ‘Blur’ installation even had
Fujiko Nakaya, the fog artist on the 1970 Pavilion project, acting as a
consultant. The Expo felt like a vast laboratory for technological and spatial
exploration. It convinced me of the impact and value of large-scale
experimental and dynamic immersive environments. The fusion of digital media
and expressive physical envelopes created a sense of great dramatic moment and
the enormous possibilities available for the creation of innovative and rich
architectural experiences. The scale of the Expo meant that the visitor could
escape into entire urban landscapes of these ideas. An extensive account of the
temporary exhibition has been published by Birkhäuser.36
Blur, the installation by Diller and Scofidio, was originally
intended to be a media pavilion, to foreground relational interaction between
the visitors walking in a dynamic, ephemeral, technologically enhanced field. A
large media panorama was to be situated in a room floating in a cloud of mist
above a lake. Interestingly this panorama installation eventually appeared in
another installation, inside a gigantic rust steel cube, floating on another
lake, designed by Jean Nouvel. In the Blur installation visitors were to be
encouraged to interact by using their individual interest profiles that were
broadcast from personally programmed IR beacon badges. These were to be
designed and fabricated by IDEO. The interior spatial experience was intended
to reveal and amplify the potential relational ecology of occupation of the
space.
To conclude, in architectural and design practice, we are writing scripts.
The spaces and spatial experiences we design act as the sets within which these
scripts are addressed. This calls into play the idea of the role of the
designer as a dramaturg.40 The dramaturg, working on the dramatic
script, acts as a critic, analyst, interpreter and advocate, researching the
origins and relevance of the work and possible approaches to it. Within theatre
practice the dramaturg’s domain can extend to addressing an institution,
analysing and organising its goals and vision. In framing the architectural
domain as one critically engaged in constructing a social artefact it seems
that the theatre has created a relationship between experiencing an event and
critically analysing the designing of that experience, the scripting and the
ideas underlying the event. As such the dramaturg can be thought of as the
curator of an ecology of occupation, defining or refining roles, processes and
experience.
This idea of analysis seems to anchor the role of the dramaturg, but
the dramaturg, like a contemporary researcher or analyst, critiques projects
rather than designs them. It seems to me that the role of the architect cast by
Viollet-le-duc as an analytic investigator of the needs of his client’s and
their project’s has great similarities with the role of the dramaturg. This
role identifies the importance of design as the process that sculpts the
resulting ecology of occupation and the performance of the users and the space
in reaction to each other, but also one that can be continually evaluated in
relation the reading or translation that it brings to the ‘source material’. Finally
the FORM IS A VERB.
