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

Chapter 11

Swimming upstream

Repositioning authorship and expanding the agency of the architect

Blair Satterfield and Marc Swackhamer

Designers can no longer afford to operate outside the flow of production. This chapter highlights examples of interior architectural practice models and projects built with custom tools that challenge conventional fabrication methods. Through increased participation in the construction process, materials research, tool design, and atypical collaborative teams, the designers discussed herein have increased formal variation to produce work that is more sensitive to program and performance, while decreasing cost. An example project, Swimming Upstream, speculates on how designers can recapture control of construction processes that have left them increasingly marginalized as participants in the conception of interiors, buildings, cities, and infrastructures. It offers tactics like the production of custom adaptable tools and processes (applied to a variety of material practices) to transform and aggregate excessively standardized building materials at varying scales from architectural interiors to infrastructure. It considers moving the point

of production from the factory (consolidated and centralized) to the jobsite (distributed and situated), and returning control of production to the architect.

The expanding space of work

The petroleum, software, biotech, metals, and pharmaceutical industries are not typically offered as model examples for best practices in design. The mention of them here is in no way an endorsement of their products, politics, or global practices. Instead, they are presented as business models that share one important trait: each of these industries defines the space of work as a complete and inclusive continuum that has location and directional flow. In each of the examples offered, the space of work is referred to as a stream with distinct locations defined as upstream, midstream, and downstream. Each location refers to a specific phase or type of work. Upstream identifies the search for and extraction of a resource. Midstream refers to the storage and distribution of raw materials. Downstream is where a given resource is refined and converted into a product. Designers, and to some extent architects, are increasingly expanding their work streams. As new technologies and tools become available, it is productive to consider other industries for examples of how the field of design is evolving.

Increased access to information and digital tools is expanding the reach of the designer, allowing entry into areas of production and fabrication long lost to other industries and professionals. These tools are also opening up market segments and fundamentally shifting how designers conceive of materials, construction, and architectural form. Software has grown into more than merely a tool of representation. It is increasingly paired with digital fabrication tools, a marriage of input and output that become generators of real physical form. The compact sizes and increasing ubiquity of these tools relentlessly erodes the defining hold industry has had on construction, and therefore design strategies, up to and through the twentieth century. These shifts have opened new areas of discourse in design

and changed how we define authorship. The following models are offered as examples.

Shared collaborative authorship

Consultancy in design practice is a trusted approach where specialists from a variety of focused disciplines work in support of a lead designer’s established vision for a project. Jenny Sabin Studio uses this strategy to generate its designs. By designing collaboratively with individuals ranging from materials scientists, electrical and systems engineers, and cellular biologists to members of parallel disciplines (industrial designers at Nike, for example), Sabin is able to conceive and prototype innovative projects that operate at multiple scales and use material properties and biological processes as points of departure. One example, “eSkin,” studies cellular behavior and utilizes it as a model for generating responsive architectural surfaces. These novel systems actively answer to environmental input at a microscopic level. The result is a project that behaves more like a living organism than a building. By developing the design through bioengineering research and collaboratively authoring that research with consultants earlier in the process (upstream from where an architect typically operates), Sabin fundamentally challenges the status quo of conventional design practice. In another project, Branching Morphologies, she collaborates with a discipline even further removed from design: the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. Through a simple set of rules gleaned from her collaborator’s research into lung endothelial cell growth, a complex datascape of woven textile surfaces emerges. In the project, Sabin serves less as a conventional designer and more as an investigative researcher, by identifying rules and patterns from another field of study from which she borrows to generate architectural form. Branching Morphologies serves as a didactic to clarify for the layperson an otherwise impenetrable biological process, while simultaneously offering a novel and unpredictable spatial experience.

Authoring new tools Innovation within an existing set of means and methods has limits. In order to truly push a boundary, the tools used to generate ideas, forms, and assemblies need to evolve as well. Gehry Technologies was borne out of Frank O. Gehry Architects’ interest in developing new and more powerful ways of delivering complex architectural projects.$^1$ Founded over twenty years ago, Gehry Technologies was an early adopter of Building Information Management (BIM) software. The firm borrowed parametric software and digital fabrication tools from other industries and applied them to building design and delivery. This ultimately led to direct collaborations with aerospace and automotive designers and engineers to develop new tools and techniques for their practice. Today, Gehry Technologies (acquired by Trimble in 2014) is a powerful consultancy with services that range from modeling and detailing architectural assemblies to generating 4D models of construction and product delivery. The lesson gleaned here is that, increasingly, when architects and designers grow dissatisfied with the tools available to them for project design, construction, and delivery, instead of compromising their work to fit into an antiquated system, they are swimming upstream to design the tools that help them design their work. This requires new knowledge and an ability to collaborate with and borrow ideas from others. In the case of Gehry Technologies, dissatisfaction with in-place modeling software led the company to look outside the conventional boundaries of the field of architecture. In other cases, designers have instead relied on their own unique expertise to influence areas of project delivery typically not under their control.

Authorship through labor and behavior SHoP Architects designed the Virgin Atlantic Upper Class Clubhouse to accommodate first class travelers in JFK International Airport’s Terminal 4. The project is conceived as a combinatory critique of security (visual surveillance) and privilege (conspicuous consumption). The resulting interior

project is a complex undulating screen wall comprised of thousands of digitally designed and fabricated components. The construction of the project would have been prohibitive if skilled labor was required. The solution was to control assembly at the point of production. The logics of digital fabrication allowed the designers to create idiosyncratic pieces that were numbered and keyed for easy site assembly. Through this project and others like it, SHoP has grown to become specifically known for taking unprecedented control of construction and fabrication processes to carefully manage project output and costs. Where, in the case of Gehry Technologies, designers look outward to develop new tools for internal design processes (swimming upstream), in the case of SHoP, designers look inward to develop new tools for external partners (swimming downstream) in order to help them realize projects more efficiently and cost-effectively. In both cases, they are operating outside conventional territories of their discipline to create new spaces.

In the Silk Pavilion, Neri Oxman and MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter Group do more than manage construction; they give design authority over to those doing the building. Instead of using digital fabrication tools to control the assembly of their design, the design team for the Silk Pavilion use scientific observation to predict the behavior of their construction team – live silkworms. Oxman and company deploy the live silkworms over a prefabricated, stretched net to weave the skin of an indoor domed room. By creating an armature that is first, a habitat for some 6,500 silkworms, and second, a space for human habitation, the team leverages the behavior of a natural system to ensure that the final design is unpredictable and serendipitous. While the designers can predict and direct a formal outcome, the precise nature of the pavilion’s appearance is left in the hands (or spinnerets) of the silkworms. The pre-constructed armature anticipates behavioral tendencies, but cannot, with any degree of certainty, predict final appearance. Like Gehry Technologies and SHoP, the Mediated Matter Group resituates authorship in order to redefine what it means to “design” something. In this case the designers are “swimming midstream” to conflate design and construction into a single process.

This leads us to VarVac Wall, which we offer as an extended case study of our own work, to further speculate on the myriad ways designers are redefining design agency. In VarVac Wall (HouMinn Practice), we resituate control, and consequently the hand of the designer, by developing first, a system, and second, a tool, which together generate the project’s formal characteristics. We do not willfully design the project. Instead, its final appearance is contingent upon programmatic circumstance and material parameters. As the designers (or perhaps more accurately, the strategists), we set the stage for the project to unfold as a consequence of dynamic variables. The resulting project is more precisely responsive to its surroundings and markedly less expensive than it would have been using traditional construction techniques.

To understand how the project’s system and tool set resituate authorship, it is first important to describe both in some detail. To generate the system, we surveyed the acoustic characteristics of an existing space: the front lobby/reception area of the University of Minnesota School of Architecture (Figure 11.1). This space has very particular sound requirements that change locally within the space from position to position. For example, in one location where a visitor might stand to converse with a receptionist, the room needs to be acoustically deadened with as little sound echo as possible. In another area, where that same visitor might sit to wait for an appointment, the room needs to be acoustically diffusive, but not necessarily absorptive as verbal communication is less important. To accommodate these differing sound requirements, we mapped a large wall in the space according to which areas adjacent to it needed to be absorptive and which areas needed to be reflective/diffusive. This mapping exercise defined zones on the wall with gradient conditions along their boundaries.

Once this system was in place, we developed an adaptable modular panel that could transform incrementally to accommodate the space’s varying acoustic requirements. We identified a material in which we could easily modify shape and could also, dependent on its porosity, modify its ability to absorb or reflect sound. Because of our experience with it, and our mounting dissatisfaction with its limitations, we chose to use vacuum-

formed polystyrene. We say dissatisfaction because traditional vacuum forming comes with significant limitations. It is an excellent material if the goal is to produce multiple copies of an identical shape. This is because the initial mold presents a relatively high upfront cost, but the cost per unit decreases as more copies are produced. However, if units with any variation are desired, it is a very expensive material and process. Any modification to unit shape, even if minor, requires the fabrication of an entirely new mold. We grew interested in challenging this inherent material limitation.

To do so, we developed a variable vacuum-forming mold (Figure 11.2). This mold turns traditional vacuum forming on end through the incorporation of dynamically modifiable components in the mold itself. The mold is relatively simple and inexpensive, especially when compared to

traditional molds. It is comprised of a large rectangular frame the size of the finished panel, and a series of cables stretched across it. The quantity, position, and density of those cables are variable. To produce a panel, a sheet of polystyrene is heated in a traditional vacuum-forming machine until it is droopy and pliable. Then, it is placed over the mold, where suction from the machine’s vacuum pulls the pliable plastic through the openings between the cables. This produces a final panel made of a series of topographic hills. There are large hills where the cables were spaced further apart and small hills where they were spaced close together. From here, we set up a system of rules to perforate the panels. Any “hill” in a panel, as described above, extending higher than six inches, was trimmed off, turning it from a “hill” shape to a “butte” shape (or perhaps more precisely, a “volcano” shape, as this produced not a flat, closed top, but a hole). Larger hills resulted in larger holes. Described in another way, the further apart the cables on a given mold, the more porous the panel; the closer together the cables, the less porous the panel (Figure 11.3).

This detailed project description is necessary to fully explain how VarVac Wall resituates authorship. The correlation between cable spacing on the adaptable mold and degree of acoustic absorption/reflection could now be combined with the mapping of the wall’s desired acoustic properties. Where the wall was mapped to be more absorptive, an algorithmic script randomly generated a less dense pattern of cables. Conversely, where the wall was mapped to be more reflective, the script generated a denser pattern of cables. In short, a mapping system was combined with a material logic to produce the shape of the wall. We did not actually design the wall itself. We designed a system for managing information and a new approach to material fabrication. The powerful combination of those two influences was more responsible for the design of the wall than we were as the project’s actual designers. In VarVac Wall, similar to examples from Gehry Technologies, SHoP, and the Mediated Matter Group, design authority is resituated. By working upstream, midstream, or downstream from the design of the project itself, the designer is able to more fundamentally, precisely, and responsibly influence the character of the projects themselves.

Figure 11.2 Diagram explaining the logic of VarVac mold. In VarVac, the thermoforming of plastic is a straightforward process. A sheet of material (plastic) is suspended over a form (a simple frame with insulated wires stretch across it). The plastic is heated until malleable, and then lowered over the form. The location of the wires is derived from a Grasshopper script that translates desired acoustical performance into a pattern of lines. The wires are organized to match these lines. The heated plastic is lowered and allowed to sag, finding its own form between the wires.

Image credit: authors

VarVac Wall and the other examples outlined earlier serve as case studies in how spatial designers might begin to resituate design authority, not to impact their work less, but, ironically, to impact it more. By relinquishing control in an area of a project where they traditionally seek to maximize control, the designer can paradoxically seize greater control. This is a risky proposition. It tasks designers with stepping outside of their typical disciplinary constraints to learn new skills and to collaboratively embrace the expertise of those from other disciplines. If we thought of our practices like the internet sales giant Amazon thinks of its business, what opportunities might arise? What are the corollaries in interior architectural practice to Amazon’s expansion into the film, television, music, or home delivery industries? By asking these fundamental questions, we offer that

designers might want to swim upstream in order to more meaningfully influence the path of the water downstream.

Notes

1. Elite Kedan, Jon Dreyfous, and Craig Mutter, eds. Provisional-Emerging Models of Architectural Practice USA (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), pp. 182–189.

2. Kimberly Holden, Gregg Pasquarelli, Christopher Sharples, Coren Sharples, and William Sharples. SHoP: Out of Practice (New York: Monacelli Press, 2012), pp. 74–89.

3. Kedan et al., Provisional-Emerging Models of Architectural Practice USA, pp. 136–144.

4. Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer, Hypernatural: Architecture’s New Relationship With Nature (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), pp. 128–131.