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

Chapter 20

From ambient environments to sentient spaces

Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson

There is a sense of frustration surrounding the mechanization of the American interior landscape; the thinness of the building shell creates an “informally planned interior” that must be mechanically heated and lit, leading to what Reyner Banham termed the “mechanical invasion” of the interior. In response to this, Banham’s Standard of Living Package proposed an alternative bundling of mechanical and technological systems that would allow the building shell to be even thinner (almost disappear) and the interior to become larger (almost endless) and more informal. Plugged into an automobile, the quintessential enabler of the American Dream, the Standard of Living Package was more than a mere set of mechanical systems. It was an atmosphere maker, “breathing out warm air along the ground … radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo … this could do something for a woodland glade or creek side rock that Playboy could ever do for its penthouse.”

Such projects highlight the need to respond to inputs and to produce variable, changing, and dynamic spatial experiences embedded with

layers of information. A need exists for a departure far from screens hung on walls, to instead explore the design of visceral, impactful, and immersive environments that not only transmit information, but also make it part of larger spatial experiences and sequences. The information harvested can be contextual, such as people passing by, local weather patterns, and sounds; or virtual, by picking up trending conversations in online social media forums or popular terms that people are searching in the vicinity. The creation of atmospheres, the development of visceral spaces of vivid experience, and engagement are key to these installations. They seek to produce gradients of enclosure and ranges of intimacy and interiority.

This kind of work has an established lineage of experimentation beginning in the 1960s and 70s with the work of Banham, Superstudio, and the larger ambitions of the canonical exhibition, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972. With this conceptual backdrop, some contemporary design teams execute projects that are extensions of those developed by Banham and Superstudio where atmospheres, gradients, ambience, and networked energy infrastructures form the landscapes of our lives.

Campfires Banham described two kinds of shelter historically created by humans: a shelter that avoided environment in its entirety, such as “under a rock, tree, tent, or roof,” or one that was “actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a campfire.” The Standard of Living Package belongs to the latter category, and Banham made the case for the campfire having “unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability.” The experience that Banham described suggests a gradient of multiple environmental qualities with different degrees of interiority. These spatial zones around the campfire could be utilized in multiple ways, allowing for the subtle creation of multiple interiors implied by simple environmental and, by extension, experiential variation. In this framework, the Standard of Living Package

was a sentient structure, one able to sense its surroundings and provide multiple gradients of space surrounding it. The provision of mechanical, technological, and even emotive support rendered the Standard of Living Package a broader energy provider, whereby “energy” was interpreted in an expanded sense, as an essential part of the infrastructure of our daily lives.

Projects like Future Cities Lab’s Lightswarm (Figure 20.1) attempt to create a gradient of space around the installation while simultaneously tapping into the larger sonic energy field surrounding the site. Lightswarm is an interactive light installation in a state of perpetual flux. Responding to sounds harvested from the lobby of the museum and the surrounding city, this site-specific artwork activates a south-facing facade with swarms of light. During the day, filtered sunlight produces ever-changing patterns of shadow, while in the evening the facade is transformed in a dynamic electro-luminescent composition visible from the interior lobby, the garden, and the city beyond. Sound-sensing spiders attached directly to individual glass panels in the lobby transform the facade into a large-scale urban sensor, an instrument to sense the city, visualize its auditory pulse, and amplify its latent energies into cascades of light. Real-time data collected from these sensors are used to inform a swarming algorithm that guides patterns of streaming light. The resulting form is an artificially intelligent facade – a smart surface that can sense, compute, respond, and interact with its surroundings.

The interactive qualities of Lightswarm enable it to be a direct register of the sonic environment of the surrounding city, as well as an activator of the spaces located on either side. By occupying the full facade of the museum, between the museum’s lobby and a public park, Lightswarm negotiates the two grounds and allows for the engagement of both sides. The activity inside the museum is presented to the public, and reciprocally, the city invades the museum through patterns of light. Between these two realms are passersby, people heading to work or tourists, who can simply clap their hands to trigger a swarm of light to play around them for a while, circumnavigating the system and giving them the ability to take over. Lightswarm creates variable degrees and zones of occupation, from the intimate scale of clapping your hands or tapping a window to gain response to larger programmatic responses, such as sounds in the museum or the park, or city-scale activation as a bus drives past or a plane flies by. These

could be described as multiple interiors, multiple degrees and zones of activation that range in scale, scope, and perception as multi-layered, nested interiorities.

Microevents and microenvironments By transforming the energy needs of the home into a sentient machine, Banham realized “the dream of the un-house” and proudly stood behind what could be read as “anti-architectural.” Banham saw this as an opportunity to dissolve architecture and the typical envelope between interior and exterior entirely, allowing space to become a nomadic and transient living system. Superstudio took that dissolution even further by calling for “a life without objects” and arguing for a landscape of energy and infrastructure subsumed into the grid. They proposed a landscape devoid of any enclosure, envelope, or environmental membrane.

In their “Description of the Microevent/Microenvironment” for the Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition, Superstudio envisioned a landscape of energy supporting all habitation. “We can imagine a network of energy and information extending to every properly inhabited area,” they claimed, “the whole city as a network of energy and communications” was essential to the production of this landscape. In this world, nomadism, impermanence, mobility, and transience were the norm. No inside or outside could exist and control if our environments happened solely through the regulation of energy. A new kind of urban condition emerged, one where spontaneous events and crowd gatherings could be triggered at any time in any location on the grid. Nothing and nobody was bound by built structures. “All you have to do is stop and connect a plug, and the desired microclimate is immediately created (temperature, humidity, etc.); you plug into the network of information, you switch on the food and water blenders …”

For Superstudio, the whole world became neither an interior nor an exterior condition, but rather, a variable, nomadic, and ephemeral sequence of events and spaces – essentially the space around Banham’s “campfire.” This landscape could nurture a completely nomadic lifestyle, one

of many gradients of space and energy that can be tapped into at any time to create a Superstudio microevent. This energy landscape exists today and is available to be plugged into at the scale of the interior, the building, and the city. The sentient spaces that surround us are all plugged into this grid, thriving and pulsing with information to be harnessed. Datagrove and Murmur Wall, by Future Cities Lab, are two interrelated projects that experiment with plugging into the grid to create a surrounding microenvironment. Both projects harvest social media and harness information that surrounds us, which are critical to the way people communicate, navigate, socialize, and live their everyday lives.

Datagrove (Figure 20.2) thrives on information from its urban environment. It renders invisible data and atmospheric phenomena into variable intensities of light and sound. The installation provides shelter and a place of calm to contemplate data streams from sources near and far. The grove’s luminescent fibers gently sway with the breeze, responding to the proximity of visitors with quiet, whispering sonic undulations. Datagrove functions as a social media whispering wall, harnessing data that is normally nested and hidden in smartphones; it amplifies this discourse into the public realm. The installation aggregates local trending Twitter feeds from a one-mile radius and whispers these back through speakers and liquid crystal displays woven into its framework. As a person approaches the installation, sensors are triggered and glowing orbs transmit what is being discussed in the social media space. Trending Twitter feeds appear as text on embedded screens; spoken into the space of the public courtyard, this data creates a space to experience and contemplate information.

Figure 20.2 Datagrove, ZERO1 Art and Technology Biennial, San Jose, CA Image credit: Peter Prato

Murmur Wall (Figure 20.3) offers a glimpse into the immediate future. It is an artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking, and feeling. By proactively harvesting local online activity via trending search terms on multiple search engines, Murmur Wall anticipates what will soon matter most to the city. Constructed from an intricate weave of steel and acrylic tubing, digital displays, and electronics, the Murmur Wall allows visitors to witness data streams weaving through the wall in the form of animated LED light and digital text displays. As a continuously evolving interface, the Murmur Wall provides a place for the city to share, indulge, and reflect on the real-time desires and anxieties of its citizens. What will the city around us be thinking, seeing, and feeling in the near future? What will matter the most? How will those desires manifest themselves?

Both installations create different levels of engagement: a sonic and textual range in which to hear and read the information transmitted, an ambient range of immersion in the information and the spaces created by the installations, an atmospheric range of mood, color, light, and effect upon experiencing the installation in its entirety, and an urban scale of looking down or through the installations at the city, observing circulation patterns and gathering spaces created by the artwork.

Feedback

In Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism, Felicity D. Scott describes Emilio Ambasz’s “anti-object” position in the environments he commissioned for Italy: The New Domestic Landscape exhibition, one of which was Superstudio’s Description of a Microevent/Microenvironment. Rather than “falling into the trap of passive abstention,” these environments were “closer to his (Ambasz’s) ideal of active critical participation.” Scott

continues to quote Ambasz in describing the relationship these environments had to their users as “an ensemble of interrelated processes, whose interaction results in constantly changing patterns of relationships.”12 The variability and participatory quality of engagement was at the heart of these projects; Scott notes this as a refusal of these objects “to adopt a fixed shape.”13 Notions of feedback and loops of interdependency that have become integral to today’s understanding of the relationship between interactive spaces and their surroundings’ data inputs are implied in this malleability and interactivity.

Scott further expands upon Ambasz’s view of the ability of the domestic realm “to become a site of introducing ‘forms and scripts’ from the larger public realm into a space able to respond given the right equipment, to ‘our desire for continuous participation in the self-shaping and self-management of everyday existence.’”14 This inextricable link between an interactive space and its broader environment questions the role of the scale of interactions in the projects presented here. We now have the right equipment and are able to readily bring in forms and scripts from the public realm into determined spaces. The environments we can create can tap into anything from the local interactions of passersby, to the social media floating in the ether or local sonic patterns. Key in the ability for these projects to gain meaning is participation and active engagement which allows them to shape and change daily life.

This interconnectivity makes the installations presented here closer to Superstudio’s microevents than to the remote “happy islands” that exist in pure isolation from everything that surrounds them or the magical “talismans” that exist for purely symbolic and representational terms.15 Superstudio’s polemic was one of a full and outright rejection of production and consumption. This was manifested in a life with no objects to be owned, one that relied on an egalitarian and all-providing energy infrastructure we could all plug into and feed into and from. This is in stark contrast to the complex and contradictory politics of the grid we plug into today, raising issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism. Who owns the data? Who disperses it? What data is represented and how is it selected? These

questions demand us to develop ways to circumvent, interrupt, and question the information represented.

Murmur Wall, though apparently passive in its retransmission of information, has the ability to override the system with a series of whispers, messages sent to it from anywhere through an online interface. Analogous to graffiti on an urban surface, the Murmur Wall can be tagged with whispers sent to it by the public. These are transmitted as blue streams of light and text that overlay on top of anything else being transmitted through the wall at the time. The whispers counter the seemingly representational nature of the installation and explore ways to make it an active participant in the conversations happening around it.

Emerging trajectories

Lightswarm, Datagrove, and Murmur Wall endeavor to create microevents and/or microenvironments around them that aspire to be “campfires” in the urban landscape. These public installations attempt to bring people together in varying degrees of proximity and intimacy by creating ranges of experiences and participation. They aspire to create ranges of atmospheres around them that compel varying degrees of engagement. Ultimately, these works create multiple and overlapping interiorities that may be applied at a various scales.

These installations map a future trajectory where gradients of environment begin gaining intelligence through their seamless integration with data – they become sentient. Sentience suggests an inherent ability of an object to perceive, sense, and feel its surrounding environment in a subjective and highly personal manner. As daily life is inundated with information and data, this quality of sentience takes on a new role in the design of the spaces we inhabit. New modes of space are emerging that are immersed – sentient – in the data that we generate; surfaces that are streaming with text and color or screens that are transmitting real-time information. We readily expect every surface to be smart, to be data-rich and brimming with information. We swipe, slide, and flip through screens

with surprising ease, and as the screens grow in scale and size, we expect the same of the surrounding walls and surfaces. Rather than continuing to flatten, minimize, and strip the representation of information, what if it became robust, thick, deep, and part of the everyday spaces we interact with? A territory is emerging where these qualities of ambience and sentience are becoming hybridized and spatial. In response, designers seek to further experiment in this field where rooms, buildings, and cities become sentient and are integral to the transformation that renders the surrounding environment rich and deep with information to experience.

Notes

1. Reyner Banham, “A House Is Not a Home”, Art in America 2 (1965): 70, 73.
2. Ibid., p. 74.
3. Ibid., p. 75.
4. Superstudio, “Description of a Microevent/Microenvironment”, in Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, ed. Emilio Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art), p. 242.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 79.
7. Ibid., p. 242.
8. Ibid., p. 242, 244.
9. Ibid., p. 249.
10. Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 126.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid. Quoting Emilio Ambasz, ed., Italy: The New Domestic Landscape: Achievements and Problems of Italian Design (New York: Museum of Modern Art), p. 20.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid. Quoting Ambasz, ed., Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, p. 12.
16. Superstudio, “Description of a Microevent/Microenvironment”, p. 246, 248.
17. Ibid., p. 242.