Shape shifting: Interior architecture and dynamic design
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Chapter 7
Shape shifting
Interior architecture and dynamic design
Mark Taylor
The term interior architecture, as noted by Sashi Caan, has been around since 1924, but over the past twenty years it has gained new currency. Since the early 2000s, interior architecture has been closely aligned to ideas of adapting existing buildings to contain new functions. Brooker and Stone established a conservationist approach that revolved around themes of preservation, restoration, renovation, and remodeling. Their methodology aligned case studies with an analytical examination that sought coherence and symbolic association between the new and old parts of the building. While Brooker and Stone take a more rational approach to understanding the interior through materials, form, geometry, and so on, Caan recognizes that atmosphere, feeling, and spatial presence are factors affecting the perception of an interior. What might be called “interiority,” which from its early inceptions in philosophy and latter preoccupation by writers, offers a connection to psychological life, memory, closeness, and intimacy.
In recent years, the relationship between interiority and interior architecture has been affected by advances in digital, electronic, and interactive technologies, particularly the way real-time interaction alters physical and psychological engagement with built space. The anthropologist Marc Augé’s book, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, for example, provides an analysis of the “customer’s” silent engagement with late-capitalist space. Wandering through the reductively generated self-similar and homogenized “supermodern” space of supermarkets, train stations, and airports, “clients” are scrutinized, identified, and directed by sensors, machines, and card readers. Replicated indiscriminately across the globe, these spaces are the result of corporate capitalism, business economics, or plain “efficiency diagrams.” By extending Augé’s analysis, Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin argue non-places as “sites that are wholly constructed and controlled to support the mobility of global commodities.” This condition epitomized by “intense concentrations of networked infrastructure” construct what they and others regard as “supermodern” spaces of flow. The reality is that such spaces are often gated and controlled by barriers, ticket machines (as on subways), and directional paths that allow access by means of network cards that identify users.
In the prologue to his book, Augé identifies this terrain through a man’s journey from the moment he draws money from a cash dispenser to the time he settles back to listen to the Air France in-flight music channel en route to Asia. The journey takes him from an ATM to Roissy airport via the Dourdan tollbooth, the A11 and A1 autoroutes, underground parking, and check-in desk where he books a smoking seat. Clearing passport control, he purchases duty-free cognac and cigars, then boards and settles into the new Espace 2000 business class seat prior to takeoff. Flicking through magazines, he reads articles, advertisements, and reviews, before noticing the “fasten seatbelt” sign has gone out, and, finally, adjusts his earphones in order to be “alone at last.”
Augé’s ficto-character, the urban businessman Pierre Dupont, surrenders to solitary individuality, having navigated the spaces that advertised and encouraged the idea that “we are perpetually connected
when, in reality, we are profoundly disconnected." This disconnectedness, suggests Bingham, results from "the overabundance of information and current events, as well as the acceleration of human life and history, but even more so in the proliferation of non-places, which are inherently impersonal and impermanent." Dupont's connection to the airport, "Roissy, just the two of us!" is as ephemeral as the places and products in the advertising pages of the in-flight magazine. He has spent the day in the company of the ordinary, common, and impersonal space of an ATM, an airport, and a magazine's advertisement that connected his journey's start to finish through the word "Espace."
In this short passage, Augé recognizes that much of our time is spent using cash machines, traveling on motorways, wandering around supermarkets, waiting in airports and hotels, and interacting with TVs, game consoles, and computers. For example, the cash dispenser accepts Pierre Dupont's card and "told him he could have 1,800 francs [and] asked him to wait," before adding, "thank you for your custom." Although this exchange reads like a conversation, it is completed through a textual interface that allows Dupont access to his money. There is no "personal" interaction, though the passage reads much like a conversation between customer and bank clerk. Media and technology writer Gillian Fuller observes that these places tend to address participants and passengers through various modulated messages, such as "do not eat in the train," "find/lose yourself in Paris," "please present boarding pass and passport." These textually mediated modes of interchange provide rules that "address a virtual 'average man' subject to a series of silent exchanges and injunctions (turn left, insert card now, Welcome to Sydney), where contractual modes of interaction are sharply defined and textually mediated."
Ole Bouman proposes that we are in an architectural age in which people, rather than place, become the interface with the ultimate aim of "merging digital and physical environments in a single interface." He suggests the advent of ubiquitous computing and emergence of asynchronous structures challenges architecture as a device that measures specific events and moments in time. These ideas are embedded within his
own practice and curatorial efforts to produce architecture that adopts time-based technologies, including animated surfaces, interactive environments, and merged spaces with both real and virtual interface. In this world of social networking through remote sites, where “human behavior is no longer framed by place,” architecture “will lose its position and character as a consistent and integrated form of cultural communication.” For architects and designers, this new way of thinking extends the work of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who also explore the links between the material and immaterial. Their research focuses on the poetic and sensual rather than the technical or utilitarian aspects of design, where pervasive computing is used to produce a more intangible or ephemeral interface design that makes visible the invisible or evokes immaterial sensuality.
Intelligent systems In both exterior and interior spaces, media connectivity is having an important impact on domestic architecture, “resulting in spaces that are mediated yet somehow remote from our senses.” Weinstock argues that the home has become a terrain vague, lying somewhere between the digital and physical worlds, between the infinite extension of data worlds and the decreasing experience of personal space. Through utilizing distributed intelligence and responsive material systems, he suggests it should be possible to change “internal parameters and performances in relation to the life of their inhabitants and events in the external world.” Two examples are offered in order to frame a discussion of the domestic relative to non-domestic environments. The two examples, Aegis Hyposurface by dECOi and the Freshwater Pavilion by NOX, indicate how walls can interact spatially with the environment, either by physically responding to data as a deformable surface or by altering a virtual real-time model in relation to movement of people within the space.
The Aegis Hyposurface, conceived by Mark Goulthorp of dECOi Architects, is the world’s first responsive architectural surface. It was designed as an interactive artwork to be located outside the foyer of the
Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre (UK). An array of sensors, such as video cameras and microphones, send data to a network of pistons that activate the surface in order to bring “Aegis into a conversation with whoever triggered a response.” It is a dynamically interactive surface, with significant surface variability, which Mark Burry once described as a movement that, at first, makes one feel a little seasick. Perhaps it is because the effect is so spatially disturbing, while questioning the seeming solidity of the Aegis Hyposurface’s metal surface. There are, however, other surfaces such as tent canvases and soft skins that also have spatial variability. The temporary T-Room (2005) designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma for the Alternative Paradise exhibition held at Kanazawa 21st Century Museum, for example, utilizes an air-filled translucent membrane structure that was animated by variations in air pressure. This project, however, did not use stimulus/response networks to effect change, but operated on a movement cycle which nevertheless forced a more intimate relationship between bodies, as well as between body and architecture.
With this in mind, Weinstock suggests that “housescapes will require distributed intelligence and active material systems,” and while these advances utilize digital technologies, some buildings have other forms of sensors that manipulate environmental conditions, but may not be regarded as “intelligent.” The question of building intelligence has been addressed by cyberneticist Ranulph Glanville, who observes that the oldest likely example is thermostatically controlled central heating (or cooling), in which the internal environment is conditioned by a sensor switch attached to a heating or cooling system. He suggests that once such systems might have been thought of as intelligent, but only when such “behavior seemed wondrous.” Relative to Turing’s test for intelligence, Glanville concludes that these examples “perform tricks,” since they do not offer anything that is remotely interactive, but are stimulus-response actions. Although the smart fridge that tracks products and offers menus is closer to an interactive device, it is not truly interactive and is probably closer to a servicing device. Glanville proposes that “the buildings and devices we currently have are nowhere near interactive, let alone intelligent. They are merely built to include clever
tricks that allow them to react, often in ways designed to retain a static stability.”15 Despite Glanville’s observations, these new forms of interactive technologies, principally operating through the Web of Things, connect activation with performance. Reciprocal relationships between data input (stimulus) and surface change (response) are affected in many ways, not only through digital screens, but also through mechanical systems such as those used in the Aegis Hyposurface.
Network infrastructure
The means of achieving any spatial or environmental change, in real time, is dependent on how technologies are coupled to not only enhance our experience, but also how they reconnect space and time with the interior. Our presence in the physical world, which was once marked by seasonal changes of temperature and light, is now mediated by constantly unfolding data – whether this is through social media or technologically derived data (what we might call “big data”). This suggests that lives exist between digital and physical environments. Supportive technologies, such as the development of wearable technologies, also means that interaction with the device no longer need occur through graphic interfaces, but “through tactile and direct contact with the instruments located on the body.”16 Such advances mean that the artificial or constructed environment might reconfigure itself depending on the social dynamics that are occurring.
Whether we want to inhabit this world or not, what is clear is that the introduction of mobile digital and electronic technologies into everyday life, and the development of new materials and controllable structures, emphasizes the distance between inhabitable space as a fixed architecture and as a flow of information. Now capable of dialoguing with variable environmental conditions, including the emissions of sounds, smell, climate data, and so on, architecture is a complex adaptive robotic system of interacting installations. One example is the proposed Digital Pavilion Korea (2006) by ONL, the office of Kas Oosterhuis, in which the Voronoi cell structure of the pavilion was controlled and kinetically manipulated using
actuators in the beams of the structural system. This use of actuators operated in a similar manner to the earlier Muscle (2003) experiments by ONL, in which infrared motion and proximity sensors “detect people’s movements in the surrounding area prompting the Muscle to react slightly, while touch sensors induce a stronger reaction.”
Given these developments, how might the interior respond to such challenges as ideas are transferred across domains, and how might these affect previous notions of interiority? Moreover, if the super modern interior continues to absorb technological innovations, it will cease to exist in its current format. This situation forces consideration of alternate locations, sites, and environments as potential receptacles for interiority and dwelling of the individual.
The technologically driven animate architectural interior that is not constrained by built form as the precursor to design intervention (in a Brooker and Stone sense) or fabricated in response to a psychological intent (in a Caan sense) offers a dynamic exchange that changes both form and feedback such that no single reading is possible. This mode of engagement with the built environment through information technology and connectivity is, as Ole Bouman argues, challenging the classical worldview of architecture as a static, built placemaking device. Under this paradigm, architecture is no longer about people engaging with built architecture or a place, but is about wireless embedded technologies that “reach you directly.” It is a form of architecture that questions the idea of timeless or classic architecture which, in a traditional sense, is conceptualized as the desire to represent oneself beyond the present. In a social sense, this recurrent process of time measured from the past through to the present anticipates a predictable future informed by stability. The data-driven environment, however, is inherently unpredictable, as its “stability” is ever changing.
To this extent, where monumental architecture has become the signifier of the ability to transcend death, because it seems to be eternal and claims durability and imperishability, the responsive environment has an immanent relationship to lived space that, if not “intelligent,” is beginning to
collect data and respond to patterns of use within a real-time scenario. Under this conceptualization, the relationship between interior architecture and interiority is dynamic and mobile, and ultimately aided by the inhabitant’s response to the interior environment – and vice versa. As a means to structure social interaction, it “enables individuals and groups to sustain shared concepts of changes in meanings and values,” such that “time” is now inherently bound to design thinking, in the manner that an entity establishes dynamic associations with its environment as well as within itself. That is, it opens space for the transitory and transformative to resist traditional paradigms and ideologies.
Notes
1 Sashi Caan, Rethinking Design and Interiors: Human Beings in the Built Environment (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2011), p. 188. 2 Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone, Rereadings: Interior Architecture and the Design Principles of Remodelling Existing Buildings (London: RIBA Enterprises, 2004). 3 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 1995). 4 Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities (London: Routledge, 2001). 5 Kirk A. Bingaman, Treating the New Anxiety: A Cognitive-Theological Approach (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), p. 24. 6 Ibid., p. 25. 7 Gillian Fuller, “Life in Transit: Between Airport and Camp”, Borderlands e-Journal 2, no. 1 (2003), www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no1_2003/fuller_transit.html 8 Ole Bouman, “Architecture, Liquid, Gas”, Architectural Design 75, no. 2 (2005): 17. 9 Ibid., p. 21. 10 Michael Weinstock, “Terrain Vague”, Architectural Design 75, no. 1 (2005): 47. 11 Ibid., p. 50. 12 Mark Burry, “The Persistence of Faith in the Intangible Model”, in Persistent Modelling: Extending the Role of Architectural Representation, ed. Phil Ayres (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2012).
13 Weinstock, “Terrain Vague”, p. 50. 14 Ranulph Glanville, “An Intelligent Architecture”, Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 7, no. 2 (12–24-June 2001): 17. 15 Glanville, “An Intelligent Architecture”, p. 17. See also Ranulph Glanville, “Variety in Design”, Systems Research 11, no. 3 (1994): 95–103. 16 Valentina Croci, “Inhabiting the Body and the Spaces of Interaction”, Architectural Design 78, no. 4 (2008): 123, 122–125. 17 Kas Oosterhuis, ed., Interactive Architecture (Rotterdam: Episode Publishers, 2007), p. 21. 18 Bouman, “Architecture, Liquid, Gas”, p. 15. 19 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 221. 20 Paul Filmer, “Songtime: Sound Culture, Rhythm and Sociality”, in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 91–92.
