(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 17

Technologies

The spatial agency of digital praxis

Erin Carraher

The past forty years of progressive architectural design and discourse have emphasized autonomous form on the one hand and programmatic determination on the other, while lacking a similarly rich exploration of the space and spatial complexity in which either occurs.

— Hight, Hensel, and Menges, 2009

Digital technology has become an integral part of architectural and interior architectural practice. Computational design has freed designers from the convenience of the right angle and the economy of the straight line. It has emboldened them to incorporate robust formal strategies with unexpected vistas and sensual curves. Digital fabrication, in turn, has informed new construction techniques. Seminal works demonstrating the formal and performative potential of these technologies include Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao built in 1997, SHoP’s Dunescape installation for the PS1 courtyard of 2000, and the Yokohama Port Terminal by Foreign

Office Architects completed in 2002. In recent years, computational design has expanding its boundaries in sensuously pixilated and algorithmically generated interior installations, like The Situation Room installation at the Storefront for Art and Architecture by Marc Fornes of THEVERYMANY. Prototype structures such as those by Achim Menges at the Institute of Computational Design use climate-responsive characteristics of natural materials to create low-tech interactive environments. The work of Gramazio Kohler Architects on robotic assembly processes has led to demonstrations of CNC construction, like their Flight Assembled Architecture exhibit at the FRAC Centre Orléans.

Much has been said about the successes and failures of trends ushered in by this work. Of particular critique are the excesses of formal expression, inefficient material utilization, and proliferation of projects deployed in developing countries that privilege economic and technological advancement over local concerns. This chapter contributes to the critical debate surrounding interior installations by thinking through the spatial agency of computationally designed and digitally fabricated environments. It considers the potential for such technology-based designs to not only allow for new expressive formal orders, but to also empower people to consider socially, culturally, and economically activated space.

The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre reminded us that physical space is both an a priori phenomenon and an a posteriori social construct. Life and thought need space in which to take place. These acts do not occur separate from space, but within it, immediately transforming it forever. Existence is spatial and space is historical, and thus existence must be understood as such. This insight invites us to situate human agency as well as the agency of things, ideas, time, and technology within the discussion of contemporary computational practices. By recognizing the power of spatializing action and examining the agency of space in stimulating and debilitating that action, can designers achieve the goals of not only reproducing society as it is, but also proposing an alternative future?

Antoine Picon sets out the need for such action in contemporary practice in the following statement:

Architecture is always between ideology and utopia. Today we are faced with a renewed question of criticality, because architecture is in a real need to redefine its political agency and to reposition itself … I think that what we're looking for is a new ideology, a new standard regime or belief about architecture’s agency in the world at large.$^1$

The same can be asked of all disciplines that shape the built environment.$^2$

Architectural theorists such as Jeremy Till and Antoine Picon, amongst others, have contributed to the contemporary discourse surrounding agency in design, which is influenced by the Marxist legacy and often carries an implication of affecting change against societal structures. Work of those like Diébédo Francis Kéré, Design Corps, and the Rural Studio focus on improving the social condition of underrepresented populations through design’s agency. Not all types of design agency are equal. Digital processes open up an additional avenue for advancing design’s technical, political, and social impact by embracing its influence to affect and be affected by the activities that occur within the spaces it creates.

Modernism’s spatial legacy$^3$

Digital technology possesses an entirely different type of spatial agency as compared to that of the Modernist movement. Twentieth century modernity idealized a type of homogenous space that was a universal space – one of the key paradigms for establishing the desired democratic space.$^4$ Developing new markets and new clients for their symbolic goods, modern designers conceived housing, furniture, and landscapes for the ubiquitous everyday man (exchangeable with every other man and woman of the same class, and in most cases, the same race). Towns and landscapes, and work and recreational spaces responded to the ethos promoted by mass production and democracy. The austerity of white walls, the elimination of ornament, and rigid formal orders characterized this work, which exemplified a radical shift in both the formal order and social order of

things. In his 1934 “Appraisal of the Development of Modern Architecture,” Walter Gropius said:

The idea of rationalization, which many people aver is the outstanding characteristic of the new architecture, is only its purifying role. The other aspect, the satisfaction of the human soul, is just as important as the material. Both find their counterpart in that unity which is life itself. The liberation of architecture from the mass of ornament, the emphasis on the functions of its structural members, and the quest for concise and economical solutions, only represent the material side of that formalizing process on which the practical value of the new architecture depends. What is far more important than this structural economy and its functional emphasis is the intellectual achievement which has made possible a new spatial vision – for whereas the practical side of building is a matter of construction and materials, the very nature of architecture makes it dependent on the mastery of space.$^5$

In a tone that presaged the notion of interior architecture, proponents of the Modernist movement, such as Gropius, saw modernity’s new “spatial vision” as creating an egalitarian and standardized built environment no longer charged by the historical and ornamental excesses of their predecessors’ often anachronistic work. Modernist architects, like those engaged with the International Congress of Modern Architects (CIAM), embraced the logic of industrial production, the rationale of economy, and the movement of capital and labor. Their annual exhibitions and congresses highlighted the virtues of efficient and economic strategies, minimal housing, and an aesthetic cleansed of its historical misdeeds. Public buildings in many places took on the air of simplicity and quietude. The poetry of functionality idealized the disappearance of form through its conversion into a neutral background. Its desire for egalitarianism turned to standardization, and

standardization made architecture disappear by attempting to hide its effects and power.

Contemporary digital practice posits an alternative proposition to modernist practice. Its tools enable it to swap modernist universalism for cultural relativism. If the neutral, multipurpose, flexible box mastered by Mies van der Rohe (and copied by countless lesser architects) was born of technological conditions of mass production, today’s computer numerically controlled (CNC) technologies encourage the ideal of mass customization to adapt designs for particular sites, particular programs, and particular clients. It pushes designers toward plurality, diversity, difference, and uniqueness. It encourages designers to value active space, which does not hide itself but proudly displays its dynamism. It draws attention to its conditions of production and impresses its spatial agency on our consciousness. Joan Ockman states that such a shift in formal order expresses a disruption in spatial understanding as well:

Historically, these opposing tendencies [of duck versus decorated shed or blob versus box] tend to be mobilized in order to either stabilize or to destabilize an existing spatial order. Thus, within the context of the rationalist ethos of modernism, organic or expressionist architecture functioned as an explosive challenge to the norm.$^6$

Despite the massive changes in technology and culture since the height of the Modernist movement, our current thinking about contemporary design’s agency has not progressed accordingly. The built environment has always had agency, though it has not always been designed to reveal this. Digitally designed and fabricated projects give designers the power to make structures and products that assert their materiality. They make conspicuous how space and matter produce effects on the inhabitants’ experience. With this, computational design can help shape a public with the ability to judge a level of responsiveness to its surroundings. It can help that public participate in an intelligent conversation about the impact of space on their actions and

their power to reciprocally impact that space. It can change the public and private discourse on design through a debate on the empowerment of those who engage with a given piece of built work. Modernists may have extended designed space to a segment of Western classes that previously could not afford to have access to it, but in doing so they often created built environments that feigned neutrality, but in fact imposed a heavy-handed formal structure that overwrote the local context. Digitally envisioned and represented design has the potential to create an equilibrium between human and inanimate agents and expand the potential of such work to positively impact a broadened social and economic world.

Even though the digital designer’s agency is processed through layers of filters introduced into the process by the use of software programs, coding languages, graphic user interfaces, and tooling, a more direct connection to the production process has been gained, and the end result liberates a new understanding of space. In the case of interior architecture, the limits of economically determined design decisions driven by the cost of nonstandard designs are not historically grounded, but rather, represent the legacy of the previous generation’s technological advances in standardized construction techniques. The process of normalizing building components and shifting to products and systems from materials developed at the end of the Industrial Revolution. The potential for contemporary, digitally fueled, customizable interior architectural constructs that are now economically viable to serve an audience beyond the technocratic elite is powerful, once the dialog moves past the process-driven fetishization and formal results of these tools.

Much of the work that has taken place over the past four decades in this rapidly evolving field has involved experiments and installations, but that has not yet been fully realized in programmatic, structural, or environmental autonomy. Digitally produced architecture and interior architecture, which for the purposes of this argument are focused on those projects not integrated with more conventional forms of construction, too often remain in the realm of figurative objects, articulated surfaces, or full-scale prototypes intended to test materials and methods for future

application without engaging with the social and spatial dimensions of how such forms differentiate space. This critique does not discount the critical progress that has taken place to date, but instead aspires for it to do more. The rapid expansion of access to digital tools in low-income areas and developing countries, as well as the open-source nature of the communities working with these tools, allows for the dissemination of knowledge beyond the traditional formal structures of academia and Western practice. This proliferation of access to computational tools promises to expand current structures beyond these myopic issues.

The technology of fabrication

The aesthetic of interior architecture is inextricably linked to the tools used for design. Historically, as stated by William Mitchell, architects “drew what they could build, and built what they could draw.” This remains true in contemporary practice. Branko Kolarevic says, “Knowing the production capabilities and availability of particular digitally driven fabrication equipment enables architects to design specifically for the capabilities of those machines.” Deep knowledge of the tools is necessary to harness their potential but also is potentially limiting to designers through their predetermined tools and techniques. To break the default response to the given functionality of digital tools and harness their full agency, designers must engage in critical reflection about the formal and spatial results of their built work.

Critical reflection requires time when a new technology is introduced. According to Stan Allen in his article “The Future That Is Now,” we are currently in such a phase. Allen outlines three phases of engagement with digital technology starting in the 1990s. He marks this period as the beginning of a series of technological developments whose impact would resonate through the design professions, leading to our current condition. Allen chooses this point of demarcation because of a number of transformational technological advances that happened at the time: the World Wide Web was proposed in 1989 and released to the public in 1992,

the first digital cellular phone call was made in 1990, and the 2G system that would make small, user-friendly electronic devices possible was also developed at that time. In addition, 1990 serves as a marker for the start of several technologically advanced architectural projects. In practice at the time, computer-aided tools were used widely, but there was not an overriding ethos as to how they could be utilized for anything other than digitizing the drafting process.

Early adopters were among the first to explore what these digital tools could do in the service of design, not just to aid in facilitating documentation. Computational design in general, and parametric design in particular, facilitates establishing relationships between elements, introducing a fluidity into the design process that was often reflected in the forms of early projects (e.g., blobs). Digital designers drew from other arts like filmmaking, which lent a literal fluidity through the translation of animation practices into built form. Digital geometric experimentation based on metaphor and biomorphic influence soon raised a new question: Was it possible to actually build the complex geometries that the computer could so easily model? Gehry and Partners developed the spinoff company Gehry Technologies to translate architectural designs into physical form, and adopted tools such as Catia and Maya from the automotive, aeronautical, and shipbuilding industries to do so. Though this second phase of technological engagement constituted an important shift away from speculation toward new modes of making using fabrication technology, the resulting forms and spaces had not yet evolved beyond the seductive and sensuous shapes that the computer allowed.

Rethinking fabrication processes, representational tools, and material explorations was necessary to make the complex forms that resulted from abstract precedents. As digital production evolved, natural systems (initially used as formal inspiration) further influenced deeper, performative aspects of the buildings, systems, and materials being developed. Works by Philip Beesley, such as his Hylozoic Veil (an “artificial forest” of biomorphic fronds, filters, and proximity sensors) respond to the museum goers who circulate through its space; smart materials like the

thermobimetal (two metals with different thermal expansion rates laminated together) skins, in development by Doris Kim Sung, to create natural ventilation in response to temperature variation; and the organic brick “Hy-Fi” structure that was the winning PS1 Courtyard installation in 2014, by David Benjamin of The Living, that used farm waste and a cultured fungus to create biodegradable brick-like structural modules, all draw from natural influences to radically affect the design and making of built environments.

In the mid- to late 1990s, as CAD/CAM software developed and became more user-friendly, methods of representation also began to evolve. 3D modeling, 4D simulation, and BIM allow for drawing types that are not dependent on Euclidean modes of seeing through Renaissance perspective, Cartesian grids, and descriptive geometry. “However we have yet to fully engage the complex spatial organizations that are made possible perhaps because the same software often present their architectures within a perspectival frame and an orthographic coordinate system,” says Allen. “As a result, such techniques too often produce exquisite objects that represent formal and material complexity, but that produce rather simple, cave-like interior space and undefined relationships to external conditions.”

Contemporary practice operates within Allen’s third phase of engagement with digital technology, in which designers are exploring its strategic and operative potential for spatial design. In this model of practice, the designer transforms agency by engaging with the design and construction processes at all stages. The promise of this current phase is to introduce feedback into the formal development system that takes into account material, manufacturing, economic, performative, and social inputs to allow for pragmatic and inventive spatial exploration; moving it past a formal, referential approach to a responsive one.

With specific importance to the emergence of interior architecture, formal expression for its own sake is no longer valued in the way it once was, when it represented the expression of a new paradigm in practice. Dissatisfaction with formal fetishization was beginning to occur even before the economic recession of 2008, but it has been continually critiqued since then in light of what has arisen as more pertinent agendas like social

housing, disaster relief, and public interest design. Though these agendas are not tied exclusively to any particular mode of practice or discipline, digital design represents the contemporary condition of our interconnected global world, the ability to respond at a fine grain to local conditions, and the open-source access to information that has the potential to democratize the process (once the infrastructure for such tools is more readily accessible). Digital practice has the ability to differentiate, customize, and empower those it serves through parametric design. This is related to the processes embedded within existing systems. Unless either designers figure out a way to “parameterize” qualitative aspects of space, or better yet, the tools themselves become more accessible to the populations in need of design without the mediator of a designer, this potential is still disconnected from the end result. This complicated relationship between progressive design and the communities it is built in are discussed by Joan Ockman in Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

What she defines as the “Bilbao Effect” refers to formally expressive and digitally enabled architecture being used as an economic stimulator through use of “starchitect” power to stimulate tourism. Ockman states, “The aura of Architecture (capital “A”) is total; there is no disappearing act on the part of the author.” In addition to the Bilbao Museum having Frank Gehry’s clear stamp of authorship, the project also initially faced resistance to having the first major contemporary cultural undertaking in the fiercely proud Basque region of Spain – being a branch of an American institution. Ockman says the conversation shifted somewhat after the museum’s successful opening, “for now the museum’s triumph has led to a revised judgment. Possibly a building in a provincial locale can have a radical cultural effect only when it is cosmopolitan enough to enter into a wider conversation.” Furthermore, Bilbao received notable criticism for the disconnect between its formal and spatial qualities, as well as the inefficiency of its galleries. Its exterior was privileged to the regrettable detriment of its interior. This raises the question about both the initial and the enduring impact of an outside technology and non-contextual style being introduced into a “provincial locale.” Similar criticism can be seen in

disaster relief housing where the well-intentioned “white savior” often ends up doing more harm than good. In short, Bilbao embodies the quintessential notion of a spatially challenged form.

The great advancements of digital technologies are also their great challenges.\textsuperscript{16} This can be said of the development in any age. Referencing the mission of the modernist designers, Gropius states:

Today we are in a position to prove conclusively that the outward forms of modern architecture are not the whim of a few architects hungry for innovation, but the inevitable consequential product of the intellectual, social, and technical conditions of our age. It has taken a quarter of a century of earnest and pregnant struggle to bring these forms into being – forms which evince so many fundamental structural changes when compared with those of the past. I think the present situation can be summed up as follows: a breach has been made with the past which enables us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in; the morphology of dead styles has been destroyed and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling; the general public, which was formerly indifferent to everything to do with building, has been shaken out of its torpor; personal interest in architecture as something that concerns every one of us in our daily lives has been aroused in wide circles; and the lines of future development have become clearly manifest.\textsuperscript{17}

These words ring true more than a generation later as we experience our own radical shift in technology and the need to mobilize interior architecture’s role in shaping the social spaces required to advance society.

To achieve enduring relevance, digital tools must be used in a way in which the complexities of their resulting forms, the space that is created, and their impact on social interaction is intentional and reflective. Radical shifts in practice – of which interior architecture offers potential – often have a social agenda. K. Michael Hays posits a practice between the

extremes of “instrument of culture” and “autonomous form” that informs a productive architectural project through the resistant and visionary authorship of the designer:

In order to know all we can about architecture we must be able to understand each instance of architecture, not as a passive agent of culture in its dominant ideological, institutional, and historical forms, nor as a detached, disinfected object. Rather, we must understand it as actively and continually occupying a cultural place – as an architectural intention with ascertainable political and intellectual consequences.$^{18}$

With specific regard to the agency of interior architecture, an examination of the space it creates is key to achieving this in the discourse of digital design.

An interior architecture: the definition of space

Each act of design is created and experienced within the context of its generation’s understanding of space. In their opening essay of Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture, Christopher Hight, Michael Hensel, and Achim Menges state, “Our repertoire of spatial concepts and our ability to understand and work with them remain relatively underdeveloped compared to the formal innovations, programmatic savvy, and critical sophistifications of the past decades.”$^{19}$ As a result of the unbalanced development of formal and spatial awareness, contemporary digital practice is not yet achieving its disruptive potential to define new forms of engaged and responsive space.

Space has existed in the architectural vocabulary only since the 1890s, when it emerged from the lexicon of German philosophers and gained relevance through its association with modernism. When using the term “space,” one can refer to both an abstract theoretical concept and a lived social production. Adrian Forty defines space as both a thing and a concept by which we perceive the world:

A willingness to connive in a confusion between these two unrelated properties seems to be an essential qualification for talking about architectural space. This confusion is present in most of what is said about architectural space; it finds its expression in the commonly held belief that architects ‘produce’ space.

The confusion about what architects and designers “produce” when they make an interior environment continues today. Is it the physical design itself or the experience that the design creates?

What we mean when we speak of space in design is thus a somewhat nebulous and fluid thing. As Hernik Berlage stated at the beginning of the twentieth century, “Since architecture is the art of spatial enclosure, we must emphasize the architectonic nature of space, both in a constructive and a decorative sense. For this reason, a building should not be considered primarily from the outside.”

Modernists, who adopted the German philosophical vocabulary for thinking about space, defined space in a number of ways. Three of the primary definitions, according to Forty, were space as enclosure (building elements are devices that enclose space, which is defined as the principal theme of modernism), space as continuum (continuous, infinite connection between inside and outside space), and space as extension of the body (formed by human activity).

In Production of Space, Lefebvre ties the post-Industrial Revolution’s awareness of space and its production in the built environment to the Bauhaus movement, which according to him developed a new global definition of space. Lefebvre makes a direct connection between the production of space and the changing modes of production in Fordist manufacturing processes at that time:

The Bauhaus people understood that things could not be created independently of each other in space, whether movable (furniture) or fixed (buildings), without taking into account their interrelationships and their relationship to the whole. It was

impossible simply to accumulate them as a mass, aggregate, or collection of items.$^{25}$

He conceptually connects the way technology is used to produce things to how space is produced by calling the tools and resulting forms; the connectors and facilitators of the experience of designing to the inhabitation of that design.

What happens in space lends a miraculous quality to thought, which becomes incarnate by means of a design (in both senses of the word). The design serves as a mediator – itself of great fidelity – between mental activity (invention) and social activity (realization); and it is deployed in space.$^{26}$

The rapid emergence of digital technology marks a shift in the status quo from the modernist “homogeneous” space and requires we define the space of our time, which Hensel, Hight, and Menges propose is a “heterogeneous” space – that which is “ordered through differential relationships between diverse systems leading to a multiplicity of atmospheres.”$^{27}$ This heterogeneous space is not neutral but active, and it has the potential to impact society through its agency by affecting change “through the empowerment of others, allowing them to engage in their spatial environments in ways previously unknown or unavailable to them, opening up new freedoms and potentials as the result of reconfigured social space.”$^{28}$ The questions concerning space and interiority in the context of the technical and physical ethos of digital practice are a means of defining new forms of possible interaction.

Tim Unwin argues that Lefebvre, after many humanist Marxist scholars, sees the dialog about space as an opportunity to affect positive change on the world. By understanding the production of space, it becomes possible to understand ways of changing the shape of that society. It is not enough to understand what differentiates space. Critical interior architectural practice must incorporate an understanding of the social,

economic, and political conditions of a place and its connection to interiority, paying particular attention to underserved populations, in order to fulfill the modernist legacy of improving life for all through design. By bringing together the technical tools and the conceptual understanding of the potential impact of such tools on the interior environments that are created through their use, designers have the potential to incorporate positive social change as a parameter in their creative process.

The spatial agency of digital praxis Agency is the ability to act within societal structures. Critical agency presumes the capability of acting to affect change, and assumes the capacity of acting otherwise. Anthony Giddens explains:

Agents are neither completely free as individuals nor are they completely entrapped by structure. Spatial agents are neither impotent nor all-powerful; they are negotiators of existing conditions in order to partially reform them. Spatial agency implies that action to engage transformatively with structure is possible, but will only be effective if one is alert to the constraints and opportunities that the structure presents.

According to Giddens’s definition, designers’ ability to shape society is shaped by their understanding of the systems – social, historical, economic, and environmental – in which they operate. According to John Dewey, “The organism is a force, not a transparency.” He posits that experiences are neither purely mental nor objective, that the human character has an impact and agency in any experience that takes place, and experiences cannot be divorced from the environment in which they occur. This environment, according to Dewey, is both physical and social (including history, geography, and tradition in the social environment) and that those acting in it have an effect on the system itself.

Digital designers both operate within an incredibly complex, pluralistic, and mercurial context and are uniquely qualified to synthesize and respond to these oftentimes competing forces by the very nature of the tools they use to operate. Computational design is, at its most fundamental, defined by a series of relationships that can adapt to a range of forces. Digital fabrication is the way in which designers are able to produce a customized design response to conventional interiors in an economically competitive way.

The disciplines engaging spatial design – architecture, interior architecture, interior design, environmental design, exhibition design, interaction design, and industrial design – are based on stable knowledge. However, advancement happens through disruption. In the critique of normative structures of practice, the alternative modes of operating propose new paradigms of how to operate. According to Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till:

Traditional architectural practice may be associated with predetermined action, or of anticipating the world dogmatically, through its habit of playing out established themes. Against this emerges a critical practice or rather to use the accepted word – “praxis” – which starts with an open-ended evaluation of the particular external conditions, out of which action arises with no predetermined outcome, but with the intention to be transformative.$^{33}$

By using the potential of digital technologies to produce space, the public can be engaged in ways that broaden the discussion of how the interior built environment can benefit society. In their book Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, the authors identify a movement in contemporary practice that capitalizes on an expanded field and its agency to affect change for a broader audience than the traditional clientele:

“Spatial Agency” brings up a series of fundamental questions about how and for whom the built environment is produced, and probes conventional frameworks or old-established rules and regulations. Action arises out of this questioning: individuals and groups “bypass”, “penetrate”, or “hijack” institutions or other organizational structures; they work “open source”, they work as volunteers for non-governmental organizations and charities; they understand the production of space as something that involves dialogue and always seeks the other; they recognize the radical potential of architecture, planning, and work to raise awareness and to put critical and speculative ideas in the next generation; they question the status quo; they understand making, writing, and acting as tactical maneuvers, but also as informed and committed action which affects the course of events. For spatial agency to be exercised to its fullest sense, though, these actions and interventions always take place through negotiation and deliberation, and ultimately bring about the empowerment of those involved.

Digital praxis similarly expands the traditional definition of practice and generates new types of spatial issues and potentials through the fabrication of form. As the emerging practice of interior architecture matures and designers more fully realize its agency, new relationships between form, program, and space in the pursuit of social advancement and empowerment will emerge.

The nature of the digital design community is as interconnected, fluid, and responsive as the spaces that it produces. Digital designers are constantly reappropriating, reinventing, and redefining established practices. As part of the open-source “maker” community, they employ their agency by acting outside of the traditional structures of these practices to challenge the defaults of rectilinear form constructed using sheet goods and dimensional lumber. They aspire to a practice that shifts away from the

classical ethic of a formal whole to one that defines highly specific yet differentiated spatial relationships. According to Hight, Hensel, and Menges:

Architects are not, after all, simply tools of power and agents of spatial abstraction; they do have a distinctive material understanding of space and its relations to social praxis as something that can be modulated in varying qualities and to diverse effects… Indeed, if space is at once a distinctly modern feature of architecture and a constitutive problem of modern architecture as knowledge and practice, it is a blind spot of architectural discourse for that very reason. If architects are effective agents for the specialization of power as Lefebvre claims, then one must also accept that an architect is trained to have an intimate and perhaps a certain expert knowledge about space, even if it remains unarticulated as such.$^{35}$

There are many forms of spatial agency in contemporary digital praxis that demonstrate aspects of fulfilling the potential of interior architecture as a transformative technical, spatial, and social agent. The intricate installations of Marc Fornes and THEVERYMANY promise a new form of interiority that is both heterogeneous and homogeneous; the material research of Achim Menges at the Institute of Computational Design premises the use of digital tools to reengage designers with the natural properties of the materials they use; perhaps most effective for the nature of this argument, WikiHouse’s open-source, digitally driven, and environmentally responsive design provides a broad range of clients who would not otherwise be able to afford a designer’s services to adapt and fabricate their own home.

Most of the computationally designed and digitally fabricated projects that are pushing boundaries on the technology and material fronts of interiority are still focused on process-based advances and do not yet address the experiential aspects of their design. The disruptive stage of this advancement is over, and now the work of understanding how to better harness these tools for the social good, and make visible the active space that

is produced, is beginning. The space is responsive and impactful, effecting change through the empowerment of others to engage with it. Modernist space may have allowed greater agency for inhabitants because of its neutrality, but contemporary space engages the public in a relationship where the human agent and the spatial agent are equal. This reciprocal engagement extends beyond just the user to the designer, who is also an active character in its production.

The challenge of contemporary digital praxis within interior architecture is to identify and legitimize itself both within the traditionally defined realm of spatial practice and within the public that consumes it by establishing a way of talking about its agency. Computational design offers ways of thinking in relationships that can begin to incorporate social, spatial, and experiential parameters alongside formal and performative ones. Digital fabrication as an act of making creates an interaction with space that is more conscious and shifts the understanding of our relationship to structure to a more conspicuous one. Even though designers working to expand digital praxis in interior architecture have become more specialized, they have gained the potential for their built work to serve an audience beyond the technocratic elite once the dialog expands beyond the formal results of these tools.

Notes

1. Scott Lash, Antoine Picon, and Margaret Crawford, “Agency and Architecture: How to Be Critical?” (Scott Lash and Antoine Picon, in Conversation with Kenny Cupers and Isabelle Doucet, Comments by Margaret Crawford), FOOTPRINT 3, no. 1 (2009): 7–20.
2. Ibid.
3. Special thanks to Shundana Yusaf from the University of Utah’s School of Architecture for her guidance and editing during the development of this chapter. She gave significant input to help establish my understanding of the space of Modernist architecture in this section amongst many other invaluable insights and connections. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are solely my own.

4 Michael Hensel and Achim Menges, “The Heterogeneous Space of Morpho-Ecologies”, in AD Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture, ed. Christopher Hight, Michael Hensel, and Achim Menges (Chichester: Wiley, 2009), p. 199.

5 Walter Gropius, “Appraisal of the Development of Modern Architecture” (1934), in The Scope of Total Architecture (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1980), pp. 62–63. Emphasis is from the original text.

6 Joan Ockman, “New Politics of the Spectacle: ‘Bilbao’ and the Global Imagination”, in Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place, ed. D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 234.

7 Branko Kolarevic, ed., Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing (New York and London: Taylor & Francis, 2004), pp. 32–33.

8 Ibid.

9 Stan Allen, “The Future That Is Now”, The Design Observer 3 (2012), http://places.designobserver.com/feature/architecture-school-the-future-that-is-now/32728/

10 Ibid.

11 Christopher Hight, Michael Hensel, and Achim Menges, eds., “En Route: Toward a Discourse on Heterogeneous Space Beyond Modernist Space-Time and Post-Modernist Social Geography”, in AD Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture, ed. Christopher Hight, Michael Hensel, and Achim Menges (Chichester: Wiley, 2009), p. 10.

12 Allen, “The Future That Is Now”.

13 Tim Love, “Between Mission Statement and Parametric Model”, Places Journal September (2009), https://placesjournal.org/article/between-mission-statement-and-parametric-model

14 Ockman, “New Politics of the Spectacle”, in Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place, ed. D. Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren (Oxford: Berg, 2004) p. 231.

15 Ibid., p. 230.

16 Rory Stott, “The Depreciating Value of Form in the Age of Digital Fabrication”, ArchDaily, 13 April 2014, www.archdaily.com/?p=495089 (accessed 26 September 2014).

17 Gropius, “Appraisal of the Development of Modern Architecture”, pp. 61–62.

18 K. Michael Hays, “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form”, Perspecta 21 (1984): 14–29.

19 Hight, Hensel, and Menges, eds., “En Route”, p. 11.

20 Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013), pp. 256–275. 21 Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Thoughts on Style 1886–1909 (Santa Monica: The Getty Center Publications Program, 1996), p. 152. 22 Forty, Words and Buildings, pp. 256–275. 23 Tim Unwin, “A Waste of Space? Toward a Critique of the Social Production of Space …”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 25, no. 1 (2000): 11–29. 24 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 124. 25 Ibid., p. 124. 26 Ibid., pp. 27–28. 27 Hight, Hensel, and Menges, eds., “En Route”, pp. 9–37. 28 Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 32. 29 Unwin, “A Waste of Space?”, pp. 11–29. 30 Anthony Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), p. 220, as discussed in Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 31. 31 John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York and Berkley, CA: Perigree, 1980), p. 246. 32 Ibid. 33 Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 29. 34 Ibid., pp. 81–82. 35 Hight, Hensel, and Menges, eds., “En Route”, pp. 24–25.