Rachel Berman
Professor Kloeckl Design Tactics
February 1, 2018
Technology Growing Influence
Designing during a time where technology has a growing influence on daily life and on architecture itself creates an entirely new perspective for creating spaces and perceiving possibilities of such designs. Complex decisions become even more complex—even in projects of an academic setting. Technology offers us, as architecture students, new ways of thinking and new opportunities for combining our spatial organization agendas and the possibilities that might not have yet been thought of as the future approaches so rapidly. As technology as a whole begins to slip towards normalization, it goes from imagination into reality, the concepts and notions that have been exposed to us through written works of both recent and years ago are applicable to projects of my previous work at Northeastern University. Including the key ideas from the readings, The City as Interface, Digital Ground, and Code/Space could enhance and push my projects in the directions I had hoped for but also expose new opportunities.
My studio design project from the Fall 2017 semester addresses the concept of Urbanism. It was a proposal for a mix use space of commercial, residential, and community functions. Towards the center of my site, I developed a space solely for public use and community gathering. This space was meant to form some type of square or platform for public interaction. How I hoped for the community, located in East Boston, to interact was to embrace the sense of place as a society and ownership of the space. In The City as Interface, Goldberger is quoted saying, “people who walk down the street using their mobile phones are no longer participating in street life: they are there in body but not in spirit.” (Waal, Martin) My one hope in every design project is to create spaces where people want to be present in all forms to experience the life and community in which surrounds them. In designing such a space, I could use Waal’s idea of the republican city as city dwellers who share a responsibility for the city to influence how my design could advocate for this kind of living and sharing community. (Waal, Martin) Public squares are where this idea would show in society and the space I wanted to design for my Urbanism concept could be challenged to grow from the influence of a platform, program, protocol, filter and agency. Urban spaces like the one I envisioned could only exist in a time now where its no only the physical here-and-now attributes, but also subjected to technological systems which make the space an interface for multiple inputs. This could be used as a strategy for considering how people would interact with each other and use or experience the community’s space.
During the Spring 2017 semester study broad program in Berlin my partner and I design a housing project with a double pane glass façade with curtains between them. The notion of ubiquitous computing from Malcolm McCullough’s Digital Ground could be explored as a way to enhance our shading device to be an embedded technology within the units. (McCullough, Malcolm) Malcolm’s “10 essential functions from which pervasive computing systems have been composed” could be considered as elements of this façade design with the use of sensors and controls. The all glass building design could also feature some sort of glass that could frost and defrost based on the information gathered by sensors of how much light or shade is needed or if to keep heat out was a desire. With these possibilities of intertwining technology into the home, on of the challenges would be as McCullough states, “Design the tool to fit the task so well that it becomes part of the task, feeling like a natural extension of the work, a natural extension of the person” (McCullough, Malcolm). The change of no longer manually covering the windows would be a challenge to integrate as a natural part of the living situation but would benefit those who live there as long as it still allowed for tuning and personal adjustments.
My Performing Arts School and Theater design project, from Spring 2016, would be the perfect opportunity to embrace code/space. As code/space is physical space defined by code, it would allow my design to organize space for public use and solely academic use. (Dodge, Martin) Using code/space would increase
organization of the steps for entering the theater for performances. If there was code either in the form of an identification card or facial scanner which only permitted the passing of either students or faculty into the spaces reserved for academic use, it would help with the security and organizational divide of spaces with specific functions verses open public spaces which I struggled with while in the design process. The division and combination of a public library, theater and private performing arts school into one building presented obstacles that code/space could provide a solution to. Similarly, to how the airport functions as an open space that is divided by code, my theater design could follow with this organization technique. The airport in Code/Space is created by the steps such as checking in, checking bags, going through security, reaching gates, and waiting in line to board and even more all before reaching a destination. (Dodge, Martin) My theater could benefit from a process, not as complex, but similar in the sense of a sequence of thresholds that must be checked off before reaching the auditorium itself. An opportunity that code/space provides is the idea of ticket and buying them online far ahead of the show date and far away from the theater, and then the step of entering the space where all the public is but then crossing the boundary created only by the possession of such ticket. However, obtaining a ticket as a member of the audience allows access to only certain space for viewing but no access to space such as backstage. The open space of the theater from the public realm to the auditorium to backstage all present a challenge of defining the space but code/space presents that opportunity.
The assigned readings provided in this course how exposed opportunities for examining my designs and the way I think of space with relations to technology that are not obvious. The blatant implications of technology in architecture used to lead to the though of screens and monitors filling rooms and covering buildings, but there are so many more possibilities to explore. It is not just about physical pieces of technology, but the impact of interactions and defining special characteristics which could embrace these ideas. The City as Interface, Digital Ground, and Code/Space touch on both technology in architecture as I imagined it and with opportunities for observation and adaptation of our society as previously an unimaginable reality.
Bibliography
Dodge, Martin, and Rob Kitchin. “Flying Through Code/space: The Real Virtuality of Air Travel.” Environment and Planning A 36.2 (2004): 195-211.
McCullough, Malcolm. Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing. New Ed ed., The MIT Press, 2005. (Chapter 4: Embedded Gear, pp. 67-94)
Waal, Martin de. The City as Interface: How New Media Are Changing the City. nai010 publishers, 2014. (Intro pp.6-25) online at: http://www.thecityasinterface.com)