By karenmmartin on situated

A week ago I confidently said I was going to write “a few posts on architectural projects which include the actions and interaction of occupants as integral elements of the design plan.” This turns out to be a far trickier concept to pin down than I thought…

One way of thinking is that architecture always considers the actions of occupants as integral to the design plan; after all, houses have bedrooms, offices have reception areas and theatres have stages because these elements are essential to the intended use of the building. However, architectural writing and photographs often emphasise the material and sculptural qualities of a space over its social qualities.

GLA building, outside and interior

This, for example, comes from an Architecture Week article describing the Greater London Authority building by Norman Foster, “the building has no front or back. Its shape is derived from a geometrically modified sphere, designed to minimize the surface area exposed to direct sunlight“. A more socially-conscious description of the project might focus on the use of glass as a metaphor for transparency of government, while criticising the sense of public accessibility created by the closed shape.

But what do I mean by the social construction of architecture? The simplest example I have is this village hall in Northumbria. The building is nothing special, a basic, rectangular room, but it is the location for a wide range of activities; whist drives, toddlers groups, art class, aerobics, christmas dinners, hair-dressing demo, practical archeology course, quiz night, cookery demonstrations and so on.

Aldburgh St John’s Village Hall, Northumbria

While the architecture itself doesn’t change for each of these activities, the behaviour of people does; the noise and activity of the toddlers group is not appropriate during an archeology course. This is my definition of the social construction of architecture, that while buldings partly define the activities that take place within them, the meaning and appropriate behaviour for that activity is supplied by the social practices of the culture in which the building is situated.

For example, the role of an audience is to watch, listen and respond to the actions of the performers. The appropriate behaviour of the audience though, will be different if they are watching a play, music concert or stand-up comedy. And most likely, the appropriate behaviour at each of these events will vary in different cultures. One of the great opportunities of technology for me, is that it can enable architecture to become more conscious of, and more responsive to, these fluid, social aspects of occupation.

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* Posted on: Wed, Nov 22 2006 10:00 AM
* Updated: Wed, Nov 22 2006 10:38 AM
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By karenmmartin on architecture

Over the last year my EngD work has started to focus on the relationship between locative technologies and social actions and interactions, and I am comparing this to the relationship of social and cultural influences and architecture. In writing my first year report recently I realised that these posts have mostly concentrated on the locative technology side of this, so I’m going to try to fix that with a few posts on architectural projects which include the actions and interaction of occupants as integral elements of the design plan.

First up, Diller and Scofidio, whose work walks a fine line between social construction of space by the occupants of the space and the form imposed on the space by the architects. This New York-based practice works across a wide variety of sites from new buildings such as the EyeBeam Gallery in New York and the ICA Gallery in Boston, to exterior urban spaces like the Highline and Lincoln Center in New York, to the temporary, indeterminate architecture of the Blur building at Swiss Expo 2002.

Eyebeam, New York and Highline, New York

Diller and Scofidio use ideas of transparency and fluidity to emphasise the inter-relatedness of materials, spatial configuration and activity in creating an overall experience of the space. Technological elements are often used as a way of illustrating the social activity taking place in and around the building.

In the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, a 15 by 25 foot LED screen which slides along vertical tracks is fixed to the outside of the building. Several live video cameras are fixed along the height of the structure pointed into and away from the building. The structure travels slowly along the surface of the exterior facade and broadcasts live and pre-recorded video imagery to the screen as it moves.

The Blur building for the Swiss Expo in Yverdon-les-Bain aimed to take this amalgamation of architecture and social activity further. Blur is a building without substance, existing as a man-made cloud surrounding a 60 by 100  by 20 metre suspended platform capable of holding 400 people. Innumerable drops of lake water are sprayed from the structure, saturating the air with moisture and creating a fine mist. Computers adjust the strength of the  spray according to the different climactic conditions of  temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction. The fog mass changes from minute to minute, expanding and producing long fog trails in high  winds, rolling outward at cooler temperatures, and moving up or down depending on air temperatures.

In the original design it was intended that visitors would wear ‘braincoats’ inside the building. These would protect them from the spray and be a means of interacting with the environment and other occupants of the building. Personality data provided by visitors via a questionnaire filled in before entering the building would be represented by a series of glowing LED’s allowing visitors to compare their character profiles to those of other visitors.

The design of the Brasserie in the Seagram Building, New York, makes use of people’s expected behaviour in a restaurant to feed the technological elements of the design. The activity of entering the restaurant is elevated, emphasising the theatrical and social aspects of visiting a restaurant with glass stairs of unusually gradual proportions prolonging the descent of each new visitor. A sensor in the revolving entry door triggers a video snapshot that is added to a continuously changing display over the bar, announcing every entrance. This “video beam” is composed of 15 side by side LCD monitors, a new portrait takes the first position, shifting the previous 15 to the right, with the oldest portrait dropping away.

Ideas around variable states of transparency are also seen in the 48 foot long lenticular wall in the Brasserie. Composed of microscopic vertical lenses, the glass appears transparent when viewed from a perpendicular direction but blocks vision when viewed from an angle. A similar wall will feature in the ICA Gallery in Boston which is currently under construction.

Links: Diller and Scofiidio on Arcspace

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* Posted on: Fri, Nov 10 2006 9:49 AM
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