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A biennial thinkfest struggles mightily to stay ahead of the conceptual curve.
By Peter Hall
March 2003
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A portable exhibition space by Festo, presented at the Doors of Perception conference.
Courtesy Festo
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"Doors of Perception" is not the conference to attend if you're
looking for advice on running a small design business or the how-tos of
creativity. This biennial thinkfest is generally given a mystical one-word
title--"Speed," "Play," "Lightness," and this
year's "Flow"--hinting that enlightenment may be available only
to those who stop looking. Commercial agendas are absent or well hidden:
"Doors" is a haven for big-picture thinking and discussion, a
place ahead of the curve--"still in beta," as science fiction
writer Bruce Sterling put it in his presentation, with an intimation that
it may be a little too detached from the ugly world. "Outside our delightful
'space of flows,'" Sterling added in a sardonic Texan drawl, "the
world is in cultural deceleration mode."
The general line of inquiry at "Flow" (at Amsterdam's RAI Convention
Center) was the "design challenge of pervasive computing." Our
world is increasingly filled with smart tags, sensors, and materials;
networked appliances; and wearable computers, but, to quote the organization's
founder and chief "perceptron" John Thackara, "to what question
are they an answer?" There is no easy answer to this question--or question
to this answer. But many speakers were clearly struggling with what designers
are supposed to do in the info-crazy, data-swamped, boundary-blurring world
of networked buildings, objects, workplaces, and people.
According to a conference blurb, the focus of design has shifted from the
creation of objects and buildings to the design of "flows"
of "information, communication, and experiences." This is not
quite true, of course. Designers and architects routinely complain that
they are brought in to design objects and buildings after all the decisions
about flows--where, why, and how these things will work--have been
made. Architects are famous these days for adding a signature form to a
predetermined program. Recently design critic Stephen Bayley maligned the
"poverty of content" in a new London building by Lord Norman Foster,
arguing that its odd picklelike form is the result of the fact that construction
companies "could build a perfectly acceptable 40-story tower without
the intervention of a single member of the Royal Institute of British Architects...
So architects are driven toward extremes of expressionism."
But if more designers were given a hand in shaping the flows of data
and lines of communication that lead to the creation of a building or object,
what would result? Amsterdam-based architects Ben van Berkel and Caroline
Bos provided a possible response. They dazzled the audience with exquisite
3-D movement studies of the station area in Arnhem, the Netherlands, and
of the various commuter flows into New York's Penn Station that were
intended to inform the redesign of those spaces. The challenge, as the pair
described it, is to design not buildings but models to accommodate different
programmatic capabilities. Yet the renderings and models that emerged were
suspiciously attractive. Their "infinity loop" design for
the Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart may signal the death of the architectural
box, as they'd have us believe, and accommodate "changing visitor orientations,"
but it's still a lot closer to a formal aesthetic exercise than a sociological
one.
A less form-driven but more nihilistic response to the challenge of interfacing
with data flows was offered by Royal College of Art students Shona
Kitchen and Ben Hooker with "Altavistas," a proposal for a house
straddling a motorway at the city limits. The effusion of energy from and
into the city beneath the house would be observed from well-placed windows,
providing--as Hooker put it with Ballardesque deadpan--"a good place
to watch the streaming lights of cars at night or perhaps the wreckage of
a crash."
The limitations of these architectural responses to the flows of data,
people, and traffic becomes more apparent when we consider the language
used by presenter Louis Fernandez-Galliano, author of Fire and Memory: On
Architecture and Energy. He proposed that architecture be seen not as "frozen
music" after Goethe, but as "frozen energy flows." This
seemed to describe perfectly van Berkel and Bos's work, to the extent that
it implies that design in the space of flows is still about static
forms. Even in the turmoil of our post-9/11 world, Fernandez-Galliano suggested,
the designer's options are either to hide, like a "smiling Borges,"
in a labyrinth of one's own invention, or to frown, like a "hurt Chaplin,"
at the desperate disorder. Both reactions imply disengagement. Likewise,
the motorway house and car museum prioritize spectacle. We are left to wonder
if the "space of flows"--meant to refer to the condition
of the network society--has simply become the latest architectural fetish;
a form-based misreading of a philosophical argument. Is sociologist Manuel
Castell's well-trodden phrase the misprized text of the noughties (as Derrida's
Deconstruction was to the 1980s)?
The best way to get architecture and design out of the limited business
of form-making would seem to be greater collaboration with the professions
that deal specifically with the larger picture. Biologist Janine Benyus,
author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, flashed an array
of wild and timorous beasties on the screen as evidence that other species
do a much better job of making buildings, objects, and chemicals without
threatening the balance of the ecosystem. She noted that we are just beginning
to learn from them. The Namibian beetle, for example, survives in an environment
with no groundwater by "combing" moisture out of the air and has
inspired the manufacture of refugee tents that likewise collect water. The
point is not simply to copy the shapes of nature, Benyus said, but to examine
the organic process: designers need to see nature as a source of ideas "rather
than a warehouse."
An engineer provided even more solid (albeit air-filled) evidence that
form could, or should, be a by-product of thinking about a bigger picture.
Axel Thallemer, founder of the design group at German pneumatics company
Festo, showed an exhibition hall that derived its air-filled exoskeletal
support structure from the Y-shaped joints of dragonfly wings and a
self-supporting 26-foot-high, 105-foot-diameter portable exhibition space,
which uses air-filled membranes and a water ballast, inspired by a
raindrop floating on water. If this was still object-driven architecture,
it at least took into account the flows of manufacturing and materials
that precede erection of a structure, as well as its dissassembly--or evaporation.
The dome deflates into two 20-foot-long shipping containers, and in
case of fire will release only a nontoxic vapor of water and vinegar
into the atmosphere.
The best example of thinking that actively engages other disciplines is
interactive design. Malcolm McCullough, a professor of architecture at the
University of Michigan who first became involved in interface design
in the 1980s, offered the most tangible take-home message from "Flow."
Deflating some of the conference's giddier air, he pointed out that
"flow needs fixity": rivers need banks, cars need highways,
and money needs cities, which act as "switches." In William Cronon's
book Nature's Metropolis, McCullough said, the cultural geography of half
the American interior has been shaped by the flow of resources (grain
trains) through Chicago. Similarly the flows of data
--which we previously fantasized as coursing through a metaphysical world
known as cyberspace--need fixed points and switches for computing to
become pervasive. The importance of physical context here is key, according
to McCullough, who sees the universalist "one-size-fits-all"
version of information flows as outdated. "Can pervasive computing
reawaken us to what matters about architecture?" he asked. Only if
we stop approaching it as "attention-seeking form" and start seeing
it as part of the overall cultural "background" for the activity
that goes on around it.
McCullough's rather dense argument gave those of us riding the tram through
Amsterdam something to chew on. It's not a city that boasts grands projets
à la Paris or Very Big Buildings as in London, but what he calls
the "subtle inflection of a concise repertoire of workable architectural
types." One of the best criteria for appreciating architecture is whether
it is memorable, McCullough writes. And sitting in Schiphol airport postconference
thinking about Amsterdam, I recall less its Rijksmuseum, neo-Gothic post
office, or Royal Palace than its glistening girdle of canals lined
with lofty medieval gable houses, the clatter of trams, the whir of bicycles,
and the sweet spicy taste of Indonesian food--itself a trace of the flow
of plundered resources from Dutch East India to the West. Flows can certainly
act as a useful conceptual tool. But whether they can be designed is doubtful.
History teaches us that we can only set the stage on which to direct them.
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