By karenmmartin on situated
I just read ‘Yesterday’s Tomorrows‘ by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish*. The paper talks (in part) about the necessity of infrastructures for supporting the integration of technology into our physical environment, including wireless and mobile technologies. Mobile phone coverage, for example, can currently only be enabled by the installation of a network of fixed antennas. It’s a thought-provoking paper (perhaps more on it later) and got me thinking about infrastructures in architecture.
Probably, no-one knows better than architects of the necessity of infrastructure and services in supporting ‘user experience’. Ventilation, emergency access, heat, water, power, people flow, and now, telecommunications, are among the infrastructures that architects must consider in designing a building. Most often these services are hidden away in dedicated service shafts, above ceilings or behind walls in a way that reflects the ideal of ’seamlessness’ in ubiquitous technologies outlined by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish. (And maybe also, these ideas of magic in interactive design). However, there are a couple of architectural examples where the services have been brought into the foreground of the design.
In the design of the Pompidou Centre (Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Gianfranco Franchini, 1977) and the Lloyds Building (Richard Rogers, 1984) the buildings were effectively turned ‘inside out’ by placing the services on the outside. One of the architects’ aims in doing this was to maximise internal space, prioritising functional movement and flow, but it also had the effect of revealing the infrastructure to the occupants and passers-by in a way that might be considered analagous to the ‘seamful games‘ of Mathew Chalmers et al. at the University of Glasgow.
Colour-coding used for the ducts on the Pompidou Centre where blue was for air, green for fluids, yellow for electricity cables and red for movement, flow and safety made the services legible both to maintenance engineers and the general public. Accessibility of services when freed from the interior space was a further consideration in the design, with the architects acknowledging the varying rates of obsolescence of different services:
“Whereas the frame of the building has a long life expectancy, the servant areas, filled with mechanical equipment have a relatively short life, especially in this energy-critical period. The servant equipment, mechanical services, lifts, toilets, kitchens, fire stairs, and lobbies, sit loosely in the tower framework, easily accessible for maintenance, and replaceable in the case of obsolescence.”
This is a topic of perhaps even greater importance for technology with its current rate of development and lack of reliability. Which brings us tidily back round to another point in Bell and Dourish’s paper; that perhaps the goal of seamlessness is inhibiting the implementation of technologies in our everyday environment. Certainly this would seem to be the case for responsive/interactive architecture. While there are many great examples of installations, demos and interventions in the urban environment there are relatively few examples of permanent, built responsive or interactive buildings. And I wonder if a large part of this is to do with the implicit risk of embedding technological infrastructure into a building without providing for easy access to it if, and when, it fails.
Pompidou Centre (Architecture Week)
Lloyds Building (richardrogers.co.uk)
*Seems like this is paper of the week, both Nicolas and Fabien wrote about it recently.
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* Posted on: Thu, Feb 15 2007 12:26 PM
* Updated: Fri, Feb 16 2007 12:07 PM
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