Patrick F. Spear » Posts

Today, a bit of a sad story. Ever since I started school in architecture (almost two years ago now), I’ve tried to sway my studies towards the arena of interactive design. So earlier this year when our comprehensive studio required us to define the parti for our project, I got excited. Any chances I’d had to propose interactive systems were limited to small applications or very idealized, high-level proposals. Finally I’d have a chance to design a complete building where interactivity is a fundamental part of the building tectonics. Nice.

My partner was on board (the studio was a group endeavour), so we started planning our approach. Our proposal discussed the fact that information is something that completely pervades a building, yet has absolutely no architectural presence, because it’s fundamentally such an intangible thing. Our goal was to create something where information is rendered as an architectural element and exposed for all to see.

The studio revolved around the design of a boutique hotel, so we envisioned a building that monitored the information that flowed through it- net traffic, cellular activity, noise levels, room population, and so on. It would also scour the net for information about the building’s local context too- nearby events, restaurant specials, etc. This information would be synthesized and rendered using lights (to alter how the space felt, based on information flow) and OLED screens (to communicate explicit information and allow interaction).

As for the architectural side, everything needed for the transmission of information (phone lines, wireless routers, cat5, power cables) were confined to channels that were capped with the interactive lights/screens. These channels were tightly integrated into the construction of the walls, so the transmission of information actually carved out the circulatory spaces of the hotel. And all the channels (or “bands”, as we called them) never crossed so their directionality became ambiguous, and they all traced their way back to the building core, which doubled as the building server room.

In this way, we proposed, the interactive element was actually representative of the physicality of the infrastructure needed to push information through a building, and because the information had been given a physical presence, the flow of information actually determined the flow of people throughout the building.

We thought it was cool. And we went into our mid-review feeling damn confident. But after saying our piece, we were greeted with silence from the critics. To those that haven’t gone through the process, understand that, second only to your model collapsing on a critic or perhaps just catching fire, silence is the worst response you can have. A critic may hate your project- and say so- but to hate it they must at least get it. Silence means you’ve failed to convey a major idea at all, so there just isn’t anything there to get and disagree with.

And then the criticisms started coming. Meg Graham was most vocal, and summed up the criticism of the others by calling the band a “glorified bulkhead”. We had failed, she claimed, to actually translate information into a physical entity. She went on to explain the statement, saying that there was nothing about the banding system that couldn’t be picked up and applied to another building of a completely different design, and thus it was not a tectonic element, and thus not architecture at all. Ouch.

Now, this sucked. We realized just how superficial some interactive architecture projects- not necessarily uninteresting, but still superficial in terms of how the building is actually put together- and had gone out of our way to do make interactivity a fundamental design principle. But Meg was right- the band could be slotted into whatever buliding you might choose to make it a part of. It wasn’t tectonic at all. And if that wasn’t- if something we tried so hard to integrate into the building isn’t tectonic to its construction- what kind of interaction could be?

Maybe the intangible nature of information will, by it’s nature, remain exactly that, and never be able to be translated into a physical, inhabitable form.

It tough to think, after two years of thinking of how architecture and information might work together, that the two might not actually be able to mix at a fundamental level. They might just be like oil and water- never actually mixing to create something new, and completely separating unless you work continuously to keep illusion alive.

As I said- this is a sad story and I don’t have answers or rebuttals here…just issues to raise, as they were raised to me. I’m not convinced Meg was right, but she had a point, and pretending the point doesn’t exist isn’t doing anyone any favours. How exactly does interaction affect architecture? Does it all?