Can Architecture Inform Digital Design?
02 February 2005How could architectural design rules be applied to the digital world? How does architecture effect society and what constitutes good design? Given we spend a significant amount of our time in the digital world, what responsibilities do digital designers share with architects.
“Maybe the zone is a very complex system of tolls… I have no idea what goes on here in the absence of man. But as soon as someone arrives everything goes haywire… the zone is exactly how we created it ourselves, like the state of our spirits… but what is happening, that does not depend on the zone, that depends on us.” (Stalker di A. Tarkovskij, 1979)
In works of architecture each brick is fundamental to the structure but without the structure the brick has no meaning. In the vast network of the Internet each web page contains the data that we search through hoping to find answers and information. The research and design brief set this year states: ‘browsing the internet may be likened to visiting a vast cathedral of information yet only focusing on a single brick. We are only ever able to view one 2D screen of information at a time although we are effectively moving through a 3D space’. Or is it more like moving through a city. A city of buildings with vast differences in structure. A city where you can either follow a well defined path or lose yourself on a voyage of discovery.
It has been called a derive; the act of walking without purpose, finding new things we didn’t know, things that are dismissed perhaps as refuse or graffiti, and it has been used by a number of contemporary artists. It challenges the domination of our cities by chain stores and commercialism, branding, the brightly coloured, neon of the ‘ideal world’, the side of the city the officials and business create for us. It recognises that in reality the actual energy of community exists outside these places. It is on the other side where the unexpected happens. Interaction in this ‘other side’ is not imposed from above, it belongs to us. It is the basis of humanity, of real communication. There is a yearning, therefore, to find a point of contact with others on the streets. A belonging that is more than sharing the same queue in Marks and Spencer’s, or eating mathematically identical burgers.
One of the first projects by Stalker, the Italian Architecture collective, was to make a journey through this ‘other side ’ of the city of Rome. The side not found in the tourist guides. A search for the psychogeography of the city, within “the Actual Territories” which they describe as “the built city’s negative, the interstitial and the marginal, spaces abandoned or in the process of transformation.” They found many interesting contradictions, and within this derive created an architectural project in a part of the city not officially mapped, but inhabited by immigrants and travellers. The community existing almost outside society with its own market place and a barbers. The project drew a circle on the ground, a basic architectural act in itself. As Michael Trudgeon says, ‘The act of design or architectural intervention is the drawing of a line in the sand.’ Around the circle chairs were placed and eventually a feast was organised.
Stalker’s work is about challenging conventional architectural boundaries, as in their work Transborderline (2000), a huge coil of wire without barbs, located on the border beween ltaly and Slovenia. Mark Rappolt says of the work “lnstead of stating difference ... the tube like structure invites you to explore spaces in between”
Our network path through cyberspace could be seen as a place in between. An external journey, looking in through a window. While it can be a well defined search, to get to the information as quickly as possible, we can also lose ourselves, following link after link finding new things, making new contacts. Which ever way we surf, our path is logged. Leonard Latiff describes the path through the internet as ‘no seamless transition’ but framed by cookies and rituals. ln this cyber cathedral the entire structure is elusive, dependant on links between pages, connections between computer servers and work stations.
A number of people have started to map out a structure for the web ‘displaying the routes of [these] large complex spaces… in simple and comprehensive ways’. (Digital lnformation Graphics). For instance Starlight developed in Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the US, shows and analyses complex multimedia data in an immersive 3D environment; data points are held in a cube with links to the source of the information which can be a variety of media.
Other project are more abstract. Tendril (a project by Ben Fry of MIT Media Lab) is an experiment which builds dynamic topographic structure out of abstract but text based information. lt takes web links and creates a coil or tendril of this text based data, tendrils are created for linked pages and a 3D structure is created providing a sense of 3D volume.
The limitation that the majority of us experience in cyber world is the view through a square window. We want to know where we are in the whole, but how can we find ourselves in this box. lt is the emulation of 3D in cyberspace where we can get our bearings and find our place. The organisation of space within the context of a building is described by Francis D.K. Ching in his book Architecture; Form, Space and Order. He describes how the 3D integration of program elements and spaces result in an organisational pattern, a hierarchy of functions and relationships.
The space is defined by qualities of shape, colour, texture, scale and proportion but more than anything he says, how we experience the looks and feel of the space is culturally defined. We experience the world with our 5 senses; a cool breeze carrying associations with a time or place, the touch of a rough stone or warm slate bringing us to familiar memories.
The window into cyber space only allows us two senses. The challenge is to emulate or remind by association the user of the others, through the use and organisation of form and space.
ln the early 20th century Le Corbusier said ’ building is a machine for living in’. A more modern ecological view is that a building operates under control of its inhabitants but also the climate and environment. ln the 21st century we have soft buildings like the Portland Square Building in the University of Plymouth which takes real-time building data and creates an intelligent interface; a continuum between virtual and real. lt uses Arch-OS operating system “[which] combines a rich mix of physical and virtual into a new dynamic architecture, an ‘intelligent’ entity, that interacts, responds and anticipates: Arch-OS is a nervous system for multidimensional buildings.” Mike Phillips, 2003.
It seems the boundary between the virtual and real is blurring and cyber space is becoming more and more integrated into our world.
That cyber space is a reality is true. But whose reality? Too often we are defined by statistics, how much we earn, what we buy, we are put in boxes for the convenience of the commercial organisations and officialdom. For the design of cyberspaces to be successful we must remember our humanity and create cyberspace around our needs, not the other way around. And remember too, we are creating two worlds, those who have access to technology and those who don’t.
References
Ching, Francis D.K. Architecture, Form Space and Order (John Wiley & Sons, 1996)
Fry, Ben. Tendril, Organic Information Design (Aesthetics and Computation Group, MIT Media Lab - https://benfry.com/tendril/ November 2000)
Latiff, Leonard. Identifying Network Mirrors: Developing the Foucault’s Concept of Self in a Virtual Environment. (Presentation at Ciber@rt Conference 2004)
Phillips, Mike. Soft Buildings (https://arch-os.i-dat.org/downloads/ > https://arch-os.i-dat.org/files/2013/09/Soft-Buildings.pdf 2003)
Rappolt, Mark. Stalker, Barbed Wire and Windmills, (New Babylonians: Architectural Design 151 , Wiley-Academy, UK, 2001)
Risch, John. Starlight (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory https://www.pnnl.gov/starlight-visual-information-system)
Stalker Manifesto 1996
Trudgeon, Michael. In Search of the Plasma Membrane (Surface Consciousness: Architectural Design, 162, Wiley, UK, 2003)
Woolman, Matt, Digital Information Graphics (Thames and Hudson, 2002)
An essay for module ‘Contextual Studies’ - Digital Media Foundation Degree 2001-2003