Patrick F. Spear » Posts

A few weeks ago, I was walking between subway lines when I passed a busker- a common sight on the TTC. As I did, though, I noticed that all the people who were walking immediately by him had headphones plugged firmly into their ears. After noticing that, I scanned my eyes over the area- probably 30% of people walking through the subway were listening to some kind of music device- maybe 60% if you only consider people that were traveling alone. That 60% included me, by the way.

It must kind of suck to be a busker these days. You go out in public to share music that you are passionate about with the people around you, but your efforts will fall largely on unhearing ears. If the busker wanted to tell me that people were becoming more antisocial and choosing to shut themselves out from their community, I could see where he’s coming from. By putting in the headphones, you’re and blocking out the opportunity for interaction with something that might be right in front of your face.

Now, I might sympathise with the busker, but that doesn’t mean I’d in any way agree with him. I might seem isolated when I listen to my iPod on the subway, but then I’ll then go home, hop on last.fm and be put in contact with people all over the world who like the same kind of music as me. I can share my favourite tracks, message other people and discuss all the tunes I’d been listening to while I was underground.

People aren’t shutting themselves out of their community- people are simply *choosing* which communities they want to participate in, because- for the first time in history- community need not be defined simply as “proximity in space”. And I think this is a great thing.

The example of music is just one manifestation of an overall shift. At bars, people can hop onto Facebook via their phones and communicate with everyone they know- not just the people sitting there in the booth. In a car, people can choose from hundreds of specialized satellite radio stations rather than be restricted to more generic stations in broadcast range. Movie theatre are filled with tiny points of light as people use their iPhones and blackberries to surf the web/Facebook/Twitter- each point of light marking a place where someone’s attention is leaping out of the theatre and into a virtual arena.

That “leap” I speak of represents exactly what’s driving the redefinition of community- a radical decoupling of physical space and perceptual space.

The decoupling is occurring now thanks to a tipping point we’ve reached in the mass availability of media & communication technology. Portable players no longer hold an hour of music- they hold weeks. Phones no longer just call a person- they put us in touch with thousands of people at a time. Computers are no longer $2000 monoliths- $350 will get you all the computation needed by most people, in the convenient form factor of a 9″ netbook. Internet connectivity isn’t tied down to a desk- it’s on every corner and it’s in your pocket. With the tipping point reached, we have the remarkable situation where your mental location is independent of your physical space. Who saw that one coming?

And more importantly- how will architecture respond? After all, the fact that these devices are changing society is old news- but the fact that they’re changing how we relate to space is barely addressed. Now that the concept of community has escaped into online circles and been completely remixed, what can we do to distill those communities back into actual space?

I’d like to see bars that coffee shops that change the music played based on occupants who share their last.fm proflies. I’d like to see pavillons that cannot be booked by organizations, but whose purpose (for any given moment) is voted up by netizens, digg-style. I’d like to see mobile apps that tell you, based on your Delicious bookmarks, where in space there are currently other people gathered with interest similar to yours, and where in space you might go to talk with people who might challenge your views.

Now, it would be easy to imagine any of these things simply implanted into our currenty situation. However, having these kinds of cultural phenomena will not happen in a vacuum- they will have a very dramatic effect on the spaces we build. As with most things these days, the power dynamic is turned on its head. Broadcast is dead; there no longer just one message communicated unlaterally to those that can’t talk back. User-created content is king. The best buildings would be the ones where the architect reliquishes his control over space so as to let virtual community building happen in the real world. The age of transparency will have finally spilled over in our industry.

If any existing building sums up this new direction, it’s Diller & Scofidio’s Blur Building.

The building isn’t so much a building as it is a framework onto which people impose their own meaning. And the architect’s role isn’t so much to create meaning through form as it is to create an arena- the rules by which others can create meaning for themselves.

Whereas I’ve recently been skeptical of the role interaction in architecture, I’m now thinking that this is truly what it can bring the architectural table.