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

Chapter 23

On technological limits

Clare Olsen

Design, by definition, involves parameters that delineate the notion of making something for some purpose. In interior architecture, project goals define a scope of work that is further informed by the boundary conditions of site, contextual surroundings, code requirements, and budgetary restrictions. These bounding (and sometimes binding) conditions of each project create explicit limits to production. It is through artful understanding of these limits that design becomes stronger and more real.

Project constraints are not always apparent. Requiring both time and expertise, architects and designers need to know how to define them, as well as when and how to interrogate them. Every project involves research and analysis to demystify the complexities of the design parameters. Once these are understood, innovation and novelty arise through experimentation and sometimes risk. As Michael Speaks explains in Design Intelligence, “If architecture is to remain relevant it must also adapt and learn to see innovation where it arises – often on the periphery or outside the limits of its own body.” In pursuit of cultural relevance and disciplinary contribution, designers must reach beyond the limits that define every architectural project.

No matter the site or budget, every design project is defined by the boundaries of the discipline, historically inscribed by the profession, the academy, the tools of production, and the materials of construction. In his essay, “Transdisciplinarity,” Mark Linder describes the need for disciplinary identity without the associated posturing and siloing, and that working at the “border” of the discipline produces new knowledge and an expansion of disciplinary expertise. Whether looking outside the discipline through cross-disciplinary collaboration or borrowing tools, discovering new ways of seeing through explorations “outside” can inform new methods of working. Linder also asserts that it is at the limits “where we become most aware and in need of the tools, techniques, and technologies of the discipline.” Advances arise by harnessing disciplinary expertise associated with the technologies of production to push against disciplinary boundaries.

Throughout history, technological innovations have defined major transformations in the profession. In the modern period, new materials and methods of manufacturing born from the Industrial Revolution contributed to the development of a new International Style. Similarly, since the propagation of computational design and production methods since the 1990s, we have witnessed a transformation in both working methods and the work produced. One of the early pioneers of computational design, Greg Lynn, introduced computation and digital fabrication into his academic and professional studios. Lynn mined the design and production methods of automobile and animation industries to inform new working methods and formal typologies. Disciples and allies following similar practices proliferated those technologies, thereby expanding the normative set of disciplinary tools. The effects of the digital turn are evident in all aspects of interior architecture, from design tactics to construction techniques.

Interior architectures, in particular, provide dynamic sites for technological experimentation. Antoine Picon acknowledges, “digital technology has allowed [texture] to become a more autonomous dimension, present from the start in the design process and imbued with a definite ornamental character.” Over the last few decades, a reinvigorated interest in ornamentation has led to a growing body of digital design research, which has

energized discussions about the sensorial experience of interior spaces. In Kissing Architecture, Sylvia Lavin elaborates:

Architecture today need not be just that which you bump up against when you try to look at something else nor a monument culturally framed and rendered visible by its own importance. Architecture’s new confounds are not just making buildings visible, but are encouraging them to find ways to make perception enter the realm of experience rather than vision, to make images that produce material impressions, to make experience that is vivid.$^4$

The atmosphere and special effects of the built environment are particularly pertinent for the immersive spaces of interior architecture. In the same way that Pier Vittorio Aureli describes exterior facades as mediating “between private property and public space,” interior surfaces mediate between the private collective (program functions) and the private individual or sensorial experience.$^5$ The texture or smoothness of the surfaces, coolness or warmth of materials, and dance of light delineate the emotive and sensorial qualities within a space. Jacques Derrida describes, “To touch is to touch a limit, a surface, a border, an outline,” emphasizing the tactile qualities of the boundary between architecture proper and the affective experience within it, what Gilles Deleuze refers to as the tactile-optical experience.$^6$ This vibrant border which defines the interior condition is celebrated by Lavin:

The interior is quasi-autonomous – it relies on and is even often isomorphic with architecture, but remains distinct from architecture’s identification with building. As a result, the interior is uniquely free to seek out provisionality, changefulness, and to provide architecture with a site of experimentation. The interior coordinates surfaces that are in sufficient proximity with one another that they amplify each other’s effects.$^7$

As Lavin suggests, the amplification provided through interior surface effects can offer rich sensorial experiences. Furthermore, as sites for transformation, interiors lend well to design experimentation.

One of the clearest channels through which designers test new ideas is through the technologies of production, defined as the software and hardware used in the design and construction processes. Although broad ranging, as technologies are introduced into the profession, their use produces novelty. As technologies become embedded within the culture of the discipline, innovations require a deeper level of technological expertise. By building on disciplinary knowledge, designers can question the limits of production to produce new forms and spatial experiences. Although too broad in scope to flesh out entirely, a few experiments focused on technological limits provide inspiring examples.

Questioning machine limits

Machines are generally understood as finite tools – they do what they do – but within the context of design where norms are questioned, machines can be a productive subject for experimentation. This holds true for computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines, which were co-opted from manufacturing industries and are now entrenched in normative modes of design and construction. Today, designers have fewer limits to the design and construction of complex, customized interior environments. CNC machine size limitations lend well to the interior scale. Tooled materials are usually easy to carry and within a dimension similar to standard, off-the-shelf building materials and furniture. This holds true for machines commonly found in small fabrication shops where CNC mills are usually around four feet by eight feet, laser cutters less than four feet wide, and 3D printers usually have a buildable area smaller than one cubic foot. Of course, limitations exist for every machine pertaining to the geometries and materials that are possible to cut, mill, or print. Aside from scale, 3D printers have the fewest limitations on the types of forms that can be produced. As an additive process, printing machines are superbly capable of

manufacturing fantastically intricate objects, yet there have been few examples of building-scale use of 3D prints, due to the expense of printing standard materials like plastics, metals, and powders, which can cost upwards of US$75 per pound, and the more durable, the more costly. This circumstance renders 3D printing largely unaffordable for interior construction. If the cost deterrents can be overcome, however, 3D printing holds tremendous potential for interior architecture, where a renewed interest in ornament and tactility can be manufactured at an approachable scale.

Recognizing the cost-prohibitive limits of 3D printing industry-standard materials for interior architecture, Ron Rael and Virginia San Fratello, co-founders of Rael San Fratello, created an offshoot of their Oakland-based practice called Emerging Objects, defined as a “MAKE-tank” focused on design and fabrication research through 3D printing. By hacking additive printing machines, they developed the wizardry to print materials formerly unimaginable within the realm of building construction. Through years of playful experimentation and testing, the team developed techniques and formulas to print materials such as salt, sand, and sawdust. Although one might associate salt with impermanence, the prints are “made of a combination of salt harvested from the San Francisco Bay and glue, a ‘salty glue’, which makes an ideal 3D printing material; one that is strong, waterproof, lightweight, translucent, and inexpensive” (Figure 23.1). By mining sustainable materials, and sometimes by-products of other manufacturing processes, Emerging Objects innovates building modules that are highly intricate, eco-conscious, and much more affordable than standard rapid prototyping materials.

The temporal quality and experimentation that 3D printing affords lends well to the changeability of interiors described by Lavin. San Fratello, who teaches interior architecture, speaks of the influences of Henry van de Velde on their work and the desire to integrate ornament into interior environments. “I think architecture is still about customization and uniqueness. Architecture still responds to unique sites and contexts, and 3D printing actually facilitates the role of customization in architecture, and the number of issues we can respond to as designers.”10 Employing the unique capabilities of 3D printers to manufacture highly complex forms, Rael and San Fratello’s research has opened new opportunities in pursuit of intricate interior environments. Their “Saltygloo,” for example, exhibited at the

Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, demonstrated the performance of the salt modules at the scale of a room. The translucent shell, embedded with texture and tiny apertures, created a soft disco effect and ephemeral atmosphere. Through this research and body of work, Emerging Objects has demonstrated that questioning the limits of machines can enable new potentialities for interior design and spatial experiences.

Questioning structural limits

Revelations advancing concrete, iron, and glass transformed the building industry during the Industrial Revolution. Similarly, new materials and technologies continually provide fertile ground for architectural innovation. Glass fiber–reinforced gypsum, for example, allowed Zaha Hadid Architects to more easily create the illusion of a seamless, fluid interior with embedded lighting and acoustical performance for the Guangzhou Opera House in China. Driven by efficiency and optimization goals, material scientists, designers, and engineers working toward ever thinner, yet stronger, materials have enabled greater lightness and ephemerality in interior architecture.

These seemingly magical formal and structural explorations have been made possible not only through new materials, but also by increasingly sophisticated structural analysis software. The development of finite element modeling (FEM) parallels CAM software that emerged from the development of supercomputers in the 1950s. These room-sized machines provided computational power initially harvested by the aerospace and military industries. As computer technologies proliferated and became more refined, market demands prompted developments in FEM software for increased capabilities and easier operation, permitting designers to gain a better understanding of material performance and risk associated with complex forms.

Although every built project has some degree of associated risk, especially in high seismic zones, there is a natural aversion to profound risk in the building industry associated with reliance on codes, analyses, mock-

ups, and testing. As a counterpoint and informant for structuring large-scale interiors, installation projects can provide low-risk opportunities to expand the limits of structural performance. Several commissions at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) have been particularly notable in demonstrating the potential for structural logics to inform sensorial interiors.

In their 2008 Voussoir Cloud installation, Iwamoto Scott used digital form-finding to create a hanging chain model to produce efficient parabolic geometries that, when virtually flipped, created vaulted forms in pure compression. The design team, which included Buro Happold engineers, scripted a tessellation pattern with varying sizes and densities based on structural strength requirements fabricated by laser cutting and folding paper-thin wood veneer into modules, or voussoirs, held partly in tension and partly through mechanical fasteners. The resulting installation is perceived as continuous, yet differentiated, stable, and also incredibly light.

Similarly, Tom Wiscombe, also working with Buro Happold and students in the Materials Lab Program at SCI-Arc, experimented with structural gymnastics for the Cantilever project completed in 2011. The team used ANSYS analysis software to test the limits of composite materials for the construction of a fluid, pleated form assembled through molding and welding rather than mechanical fasteners. The translucent system was “tattooed” with vectors of two-inch-wide reinforcing fibers, producing both structural support and an aesthetic effect of networked continuity. The biomorphic form hovers above a heavily traveled corridor in the school, evoking a sense of weight with its scale, which is counterbalanced by both its translucency and impossibly long cantilever.

Similarly playing with an idea of structural magic, Heather Roberge and her practice Murmur installed En Pointe in the SCI-Arc Gallery. Based on research developed through a year-long graduate-level studio Roberge taught at UCLA, titled “The Genealogy of the Column,” Roberge designed En Pointe as both a celebration and critique of structural form-finding projects, closing a gap between the impossible thinness of the computer model and the reality of constructing actual lightness. Since each

column is asymmetrical and diminishes at the base, no single module would stand alone; however, each column stands as a cluster “en pointe” through the use of folded triangulated geometries and material innovations using aluminum sheets, composites, epoxies, and tapes. The column forms were further refined through structural analyses software. Without reliance on the nearby walls, only on each other, digital models of seemingly stable clusters were gravity-loaded in digital physics simulations for analysis. Through an iterative design and testing process, the team arrived at the assembly, which is the thinnest it can possibly be, which is stable without appearing static (Figure 23.2).

The En Pointe installation interrogates the limits of structural risk using a careful balance between form and materials, realized through digital and physical experimentation. Murmur designed a co-dependent column system, thereby developing a new typology, the column cluster. Drawing inspiration from the dramatically soaring Hypostyle Hall, En Pointe is similarly sublime – despite its small scale. The folded column network of the installation has tremendous potential for interior architectural projects seeking structural lightness and an ephemeral definition of space. En Pointe demonstrates that questioning the limits of structure can provide new tactics to achieve interiors offering atmospheric lightness (Figure 23.3).

Asserting production limits

This discussion has described a few of the positive ways in which interrogating technological limits can be a springboard for advancing the field of interior architecture. When looking through a notably critical lens on this topic, some might argue that certain technological limits need greater fortification rather than expansion. Critics of certain contemporary practices may substantiate this call simply by virtue of taste; the technological innovations discussed here do not appeal to all audiences. Regardless of position, however, there is little doubt that new working methods in the digital age have produced both positive and negative ramifications for the work culture of the architectural professions.

First and foremost, the transformation in working methods has greatly impacted notions of autonomy in the practice. Part of this shift, created by increased access to computer-aided manufacturing, was discussed by William Massie in Remaking in a Post-Processed Culture. He asserted, “The ability for direct dialogue between virtual and actual provides a substantial increase in artistic autonomy. With the removal of traditionally mitigating forces in the logistics of architectural production, the onus of accountability received by the architect becomes greater.” In this sense, the complexities associated with the autonomy afforded by digital technologies also impose increased burdens on architects and designers. The ability to create numerous ideas and test them through digital manufacturing has redefined what it means to design iteratively: more versions can be made more quickly, but assessing multiple versions to arrive at the “right” solution also necessitates testing and analysis. Of course, this making and testing

feedback loop requires time, potentially impacting designers’ work life and profit margins.

A more specific example of a call for limits, which some critics might affirm in the context of a discussion on iterations, is a reaction to the infinite variations that are afforded by parametric modeling. Computers are excellent tools for optimization and efficiency, and they are also superb at generating excess. Although parametric modeling enables the qualities of continuity and differentiation, which are associated with the contemporary condition, the variables plugged into the algorithms, animations, and scripts of parametric models facilitate an endless number of results, begging the question, is more really more?12 In each project, architects and designers make decisions about design extents. Advocates for limiting excess might look to small-scale installations, which could serve as a model for the assertion of boundaries as a way to create emotive interior interventions.

Two memorable objects created for the Matters of Sensation exhibition at Artist’s Space in New York reveal the powerful and artful quality of juxtaposing highly articulated, detail-rich surfaces against a blank wall. Murmur’s vacuum-formed aluminum Bioform and the CNC-milled high-density foam of Ruy-Klein’s Klex 1 both have an aura of objectness, making them tactile and corporeal. The modules that compose Bioform are the size of a hand, making it more understandable, relatable, and biomorphic. Similarly, Klex 1’s framed ornament could be imagined as either remaining as a singular exquisite object or becoming a bordering element at the seams of a room. Although the context of the exhibition itself required finite and refined boundaries, these sculptures provide exquisite examples of the beauty and surprise that can be achieved by limiting the parametric project.

As Bioform and Klex 1 demonstrate, imposing limits on the parametric form, emphasizing the blankness of the wall that surrounds it, celebrates the dialog between an articulated object and its context as a source for sensuality in interior spaces. The dynamic qualities of this approach to designing interiors can be better explained by reading John Dewey’s writings about the aesthetic experience. According to Dewey, the continuity of moving through a space creates “an experience” and it is through “pauses, places of rest” from “something to something” that make experiences more notable. “As one part leads into another, and as one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in itself. The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors.” Following Dewey in celebrating the boundaries and blankness

between things, an emphasis on spatial design can provide more notable sensorial experiences.13

By questioning disciplinary, manufacturing, or structural limits while acknowledging the ramifications of overproduction, designers can find rich inspiration for the emerging practice of interior architecture. Without a doubt, the development of technological expertise enhances awareness and working knowledge while catalyzing boundary-pushing design. This challenges designers to seek special awareness in each project, through either research or collaboration. Better understanding and interrogation of limits will enable opportunities to create new and powerful aesthetic experiences in interiors.

Notes

1. “Design Intelligence”, Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, ed. Latent Utopias: Experiments Within Contemporary Architecture (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 2002).
2. Mark Linder, “Transdisciplinarity”, Hunch: The Berlage Institute Report 9 (2009): 12–15.
3. Antoine Picon, Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), p. 27.
4. Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 111.
5. Pier Vittorio Aureli, “More and More About Less and Less: Notes Toward a History of Nonfigurative Architecture”, Log 16 (Spring/Summer 2009): 11.
6. Jacques Derrida, On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005), p. 103.
7. Lavin, Kissing Architecture, p. 64.
8. “The Most Important Commercial Rapid Prototyping Technologies at a Glance”, Rapid Prototyping Equipment, Software and Materials, 2008, www.additive3d.com/rp_int1.htm (accessed 26 May 2015).
9. Emerging Objects, “Emerging Objects Saltygloo”, Emerging Objects RSS, 2013, www.emergingobjects.com/projects/saltygloo (accessed 2013).
10. Chris Knapp, “Virginia San Fratello: Hacking Culture”, ArchitectureAU, 7 November 2013, http://architectureau.com/articles/hacking-culture-an-interview-with-virginia-san-fratello/.
11. William Massie, “Remaking in a Post-Processed Culture”, Architectural Design 72, no. 5 (September/October 2002): 58.

12 In The Function of Ornament, Farshid Moussavi declares, “Differentiation is a contemporary effect,” in Farshid Moussavi, “The Function of Ornament”, Introduction: The Function of Ornament, ed. Farshid Moussavi and Michael Kubo (Barcelona: Actar, 2006), p. 12.

13 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch, 1934), p. 206.