Technology

Recently published a book of my architectural research design projects with Springer Wien New York, entitled `Spatial Pathology Floating Realities’, edited by Professor Lebbeus woods. Currently working on two residential projects in Moscow and a hotel bar in Beijing, previous to which I worked in the Office of Zaha Hadid and ran advanced digital design studios at the Bartlett, U.C.L., University of Western Australia, Washington University and A.A. Published with M.I.T. and Princeton Press and exhibited worldwide and currently working on second book with Rizzoli publishers.

The adaptive nature of technology and information accessibility has displaced the role of dominant culture in today’s society. Correspondingly, through a multiplicity of custom, habit and identity, architecture is catering for the individual by using mass customization for variety in design applications. The role of standardization in architecture is a reflection of society’s predictable nature, which is no longer relevant.

Mass-Produced Individuality

To understand the direction in which architecture is moving, we must address standardization within its social context. During its implementation in the 1920s, there existed fewer subcultures and an obvious overriding majority. In contrast, the current social climate finds technology has shifted the parameters in favour of non-standardization, using mass customization to reflect diverse needs. As there is no obvious dominant culture, variation caters to the individual.

It is frequently stated that primitive man was less individual and more completely moulded by society than civilized man is. Simpler societies are more uniform, as they provide opportunities for a far smaller diversity of skills and occupations than more complex and advanced societies.1 The progression of society and the development of the individual go hand in hand, conditioning each other.

Identity addresses the manner in which we perceive and appropriate our built environment, with architecture becoming more widely discussed through an increase in media coverage, and project management and design among non-architects is becoming more commonplace, further encouraging a direct relationship with our built environment, habits and customs.

To be a hippie, a punk, a postmodernist, a cyberpunk, a cyberhippie, or even a cyberpostmodernist, is to view cultural change purely through the voluntary logic of the marketplace. Each person comes equipped with a certain wardrobe, sound, reading list, rhetoric, and claims to enable individuals through the purchase of a select trolley-load of items to simultaneously make a claim to posterity and participate in a collective identity of the now. We meander through the options, tripping up over a marketing plan with appeal. What makes this even more evident is the myriad of subcultures that have as a whole overrun the concept of the dominant culture. If a majority passively accepts commercially provided styles and meanings, and a 'subculture', which actively pursues a minority style, interprets it in accordance with subversive values, then what we find in today’s society is a process of cultural appropriation. Businesses often seek to capitalize on the subversive allure of subcultures in search of inspiring adaptation, which results in the demise of a subculture owing to its accessibility, and the rebirth of the individual; this is happening within most creative disciplines, including architecture. Mass customization provides a tailored environment at an affordable rate, further diluting any trace of dominant culture. Yet architecture is still subservient to society and does not adapt to defining new programmatic responsibilities at a similar rate to social change. The boundaries and definitions of reality have expanded, and with it so should architecture. Virtual explorations in architectural design criteria and their manifestation in the physical are beginning to develop the way in which reality can be perceived and understood. Mass customization breaks the confines of expectancy, liberating the individual in a symbiotic environment and relying on imagining the possibilities in order for them to be built.

Modernism, Standardization and Auto-Pilot Response

By contrast, mass production employs repetition, reducing human error and variation, as tasks are predominantly carried out by machinery. A reduction in labour costs, as well as an increased rate of production, enables a company to produce a larger quantity of one product at a lower cost compared to using traditional, non-linear methods – but, owing to the inflexibility of mass production, this comes at the expense of satisfying individual tastes.

Modernist architects valued the symbolic power and efficiency of the machine because its form derived from its function, and this, according to modernist thought, made it beautiful. These architects referred to Henry Ford, who conceived the notion of standardization and moving assembly systems, enabling the mass production of cars at his plant in 1920s USA. Le Corbusier’s Maison Dom-Ino (1915) is an example of residential design using standardized components as domestic types.

Le Corbusier wrote: “The House Machine, the mass production house, are healthy and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful.”2

At the same time, with the employment of mass production, Freud wrote about the links between the unconscious, creativity and technology in his 1929 essay “The Mystic Writing Pad”. This essay is analogous to the way the human psyche receives sensory impressions from the outside world, where they are recorded as unconscious memory. For example, when faced with a repetitive everyday occurrence, a ritual such as going to work, we follow the same paths without actually experiencing the city; rather, we remember it automatically. Walter Benjamin also wrote about society and the concept of loss of aura, referring to the urban dweller and his distracted state of mind, jaded, bored or swamped by the flood of visual and social stimuli of the modern city.

Repetition was also predominantly evident in architecture up until the 1990s, dulling the palette while exhausting the multiplicities of a good idea – for example, Renzo Piano’s beautiful yet predictably saturated Kansai airport, with the same section extruded for an entire mile. Currently, formal and structural repetition is being overlooked in favour of individual characteristics offered by customization and computer numerical-controlled milling. The large-scale urban projects of the 1990s building market are no longer valid financially or politically as symbols of power. These tired architectural gestures of the past have no place in today’s built environment, which up until now has excessively used standard building components. Because technology offers diversity within a social context, this broadens customs and their manifestations while breaking with automatic responses.

NOX, MVRDV, Rem Koolhaus, Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry have all embraced adaptive formal configurative software. Whether to explore multiple programming, non-static conditions, continuous surfaces, animation/simulation time-sequencing processes, fractals, or to test the boundaries of engineering and materiality, there is one characteristic that they all share, and that is the architecture of multiple perceptions, appropriation and non-linearity: a non-hierarchical criteria presenting us with approaches that are the antithesis of the auto-pilot repetitive experiences we once regularly experienced in our everyday lives.

We as individuals are contributing to this cult of distraction that is mass customization,3 which translates from virtual to real, manifesting the possibilities and configuration of design availability.

Swimming Pool

Non-Euclidean geometry and parametric scripts are design tools that can broaden architectural typology and appropriation. In order to explore these possibilities, the individual needs to rely on her sense of awareness within immediate contexts. For example, Virtual Reality has been used to expand the conscious mind, allowing it to be immersed in environments never previously experienced. Second Life shows that Virtual Reality can provoke changes in real life; as a result, we are in a strong position to test whether perceptual illusions in virtual environments can manifest in the tangible, further displacing the individual from auto-pilot response.
The Swimming pool project focuses on geometry and active perception, affecting design criteria in a psychological and physical manner, with technology broadening the individual’s conscious mind, cognizance and responses to his environment. As a result, architecture can become more comfortable with the idea of perceptual illusion. There exists a confidence in society, enabling new typology and architectural manifestations, and this project attempts to assert the individual’s relationship with his built environment.

For objects and concepts to be considered real, the mind, which has an active role in the construction of reality, provides the schema into which perception and thought are choreographed in order to be understood. This structure includes space, time and causation;3 space – as we are capable of perceiving objects in three dimensions – being a precondition of perception rather than an idea formed in the mind.

However, we have a hard time visualizing fractional dimensions or more than three, because our imagination limits us. Some theories are only mathematically consistent depending on the number of dimensions used, which brings me to using fractal dimensions as design criteria for the Tower project in Manhattan.

Swimming Pool

Time is no longer a linear condition, instead we can postpone, edit and cut our immediate recognitions, creating buildings whose identities along with our observations are no longer definitive, replacing symbolic gestures with sequential design whereby ephemeral space reflects evolution and ever changing contexts. The individual interacts with their environments in a perceptually bias manner, auto pilot responses dictate this relationship, anaesthetising and replacing unprocessed reactions with predictability, regulating premeditated experiences to understand convention. Architecture still politely seduces the mainstream with pampered designs, technology on the other hand claims countercultures creating future visions. Architects turn their backs on social change only to embrace a distant signature trend whilst public's rebelliousness towards acknowledgement is engaged.

Perception is influenced by chemical imbalances in the brain, environment, genetics and psychological characteristics and as with all real events and objects our basic perceptual processes are only aware of the entire image rather than the individual elements combined to produce that image, resulting in an anticipation of that understanding, a projected version of reality.

However, there is no longer one singular reality which we acknowledge, our versions of what is authentic and relevant involves more than an adopted mantra passed down from one generation to the next, a virus enabling us to read space, instead we recognise choice, a broadening of our options persuading us to adapt and strive for new experience, virgin territories, the unfamiliar. Technology presents us possibilities altering architecture's identity.

The project, `Altered States, subconscious realities and pathological space', focuses on the changing characteristics of architecture and space along with the irrelevance of permanent typologies; animating shifting contextual conditions into which the architecture is designed, light interacting with the building continues to animate the space, redefining the context and the evolution of architecture its boundaries between the physical, virtual and projected divorcing the individual from prescribed perceptive processes whilst focusing on the fragments which make up the whole experience. The architecture itself becomes the event, defining/ tailoring the typology to the individual's appropriation of that space.

Methods involving simulations and animations used, explore the mind, to set it free from conditioned controls, free from beliefs, which limit, constrain, restrain and imprison the individual in mediocrity and dull repetition. Every time you look out the window, walk around your home, or down any street, your consciousness is cut by seemingly random words and images only for coherent messages to emerge, we are responsible for assembling and decoding them unfortunately at times we rely on auto pilot gestures to

contain their narratives.The digital age brings with it architectures fading true intentions camouflaging them with novelty design and embracing the software programmer as they too in turn evolve into virtual psychoanalysts.

This spewing stream-of-consciousness, attempts to free the individual from social and familial conditioning that controls, hems in and ultimately drives us to desperation or rebellion, a self-limiting and self-destructive reasoning.

Interior radiant film reflecting surfaces Public & private adaptive ritual space

to create the illusion of indefinite space liquid identity, liquid architecture

3 Customisation, defined as meeting customers and individual needs. Tseng, M.M.; Jiao, J. (2001), Mass Customization, in: Handbook of Industrial Engineering, Technology and Operation Management (3rd ed.)

3 Perception, in philosophy, is the process of apprehending objects by means of the senses. Causal theory of perception, one perceives and object if and only if one has a sensory experience as of it, the object is there, and the object causes one’s sensory experience of it.

4 Non-Euclidean geometry, in mathematics, describes hyperbolic and elliptic geometry, which are contrasted with Euclidean geometry. The essential difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry is the characteristics of parallel lines

5Second life, your world, your imagination. The 3dimensional online world imagined and created by its virtual residents. http://secondlife.com

6 Causation, certain events cause, or bring about others. An event of one kind is said to cause an event of another just if all the events of the first kind are constantly conjoined with events of the second.

7 The term Cyberspace, was coined by cyberpunk writer William Gibson, Gibson was influenced by American counterculture author William S. Burroughs.

9 Complex geometry cross-references algebraic and differential geometry. A tool used by theoretical physicists working on super string theory.

1 E.H. Carr, What is History? R,.W,. Davies (ed)

2 Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture, 1923

3 Mass ~~Customisation~~customization, is defined as the ~~producing~~ production of goods and services to meet an individual customer's needs with near ~~mass~~ mass-production efficiency, implementing software-based product configurators to make it possible to change functionalities of a core product or to build fully customized enclosures from the start.

3 Causation, is when certain events cause, or bring about others. An event of one kind is said to cause an event of another ~~just~~ if all the events of the first kind are constantly conjoined with events of the second.

(D. Owens, Causes and Coincidences; R. Sosa (ed))