Microevent/Microenvironment

Definition

The microevent/microenvironment is Superstudio's habitation model, presented in "Description of the Microevent/Microenvironment" for Emilio Ambasz's Italy: The New Domestic Landscape (MoMA, 1972): habitation produced not by built enclosure but by plugging into a landscape of energy and information. As Gattegno and Johnson reconstruct it, Superstudio envisioned "a landscape of energy supporting all habitation" — "We can imagine a network of energy and information extending to every properly inhabited area," with "the whole city as a network of energy and communications" essential to its production. The mechanism is the plug: "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 …" The microenvironment is therefore an on-demand bubble of conditioned ambience; the microevent is the social eruption it enables — "spontaneous events and crowd gatherings… triggered at any time in any location on the grid," where "nothing and nobody was bound by built structures."

The model's world-conditions are total: "nomadism, impermanence, mobility, and transience were the norm. No inside or outside could exist" where environments are produced "solely through the regulation of energy." The proposed landscape was "devoid of any enclosure, envelope, or environmental membrane." 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.'" The polemic behind the model was economic: "a full and outright rejection of production and consumption… 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."

Gattegno and Johnson's claim is that this landscape "exists today and is available to be plugged into at the scale of the interior, the building, and the city" — and that their installations (Lightswarm, Datagrove, Murmur Wall) "experiment with plugging into the grid to create a surrounding microenvironment," harvesting the social-media and information that "are critical to the way people communicate, navigate, socialize, and live their everyday lives." Their installations "endeavor to create microevents and/or microenvironments around them that aspire to be 'campfires' in the urban landscape" — but with the crucial difference that today's grid "rais[es] issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism" that Superstudio's egalitarian fantasy presupposed away. See event-space (the grotto register's event typology), the-campfire (the prototype), sentient-spaces (the grid's current inhabitants), new-babylon (Constant's nomad-city cousin).

Key Thinkers

• Superstudio — the model's authors: the radical-architecture collective whose "Description of the Microevent/Microenvironment" (MoMA catalogue, 1972, pp. 242–249) fused Banham's campfire, the energy grid, and the rejection of the object (collective — Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo di Francia et al.; not paged — see log).
• Nataly Gattegno & Jason Kelly Johnson — the model's contemporary translators: the claim that the energy landscape "exists today," and the installations that plug into it while exposing its politics.
• Reyner Banham — the proto-source: the campfire and the Standard of Living Package as the model's mechanical ancestor ("essentially the space around Banham's 'campfire'").
• Felicity D. Scott — the critical historian of the model's exhibition context: Ambasz's "anti-object" position, "active critical participation," and the refusal "to adopt a fixed shape" as the microevent's curatorial frame (via Architecture or Techno-Utopia).

Related Concepts

• Event Space — the typological sibling: Garófalo-Khan's grotto is "an event space, not a place of quotidian habitation" — exceptional, cosmology-bearing; Superstudio's microevent is the generalized event space, the world as event-sequence.
• The Campfire — the prototype: the campfire's gradients as the original microenvironment, "the space around Banham's 'campfire'" being Superstudio's own world-image.
• Sentient Spaces — the model's current inhabitants: "The sentient spaces that surround us are all plugged into this grid."
• Ambient Conditioning — the technical core: the microenvironment is an ambient condition — "the desired microclimate is immediately created (temperature, humidity, etc.)" — by plug rather than by envelope.
• New Babylon — the Situationist cousin: Constant's multilevel nomad city for a post-work society of play; Superstudio's grid shares the nomadism, impermanence, and anti-bourgeois program, but replaces built sectors with pure infrastructure.
• Boundaries — the model's target: "a landscape devoid of any enclosure, envelope, or environmental membrane" — the boundary dissolved into the grid.
• Inside/Outside Dialectic — the model's spatial claim: "No inside or outside could exist"; the whole world "neither an interior nor an exterior condition."
• Consumerism — the polemic: "a full and outright rejection of production and consumption" — "a life with no objects to be owned."
• Everyday Life — the model's field of operation: information "critical to the way people communicate, navigate, socialize, and live their everyday lives."
• Privacy — the model's unresolved cost: the grid's "complex and contradictory politics… of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism."
• Atmospheric Politics — the model's political sequel: the microclimate as an administered good that divides publics rather than liberating them (Solomon's Hong Kong).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• From ambient environments to sentient spaces (Gattegno & Johnson 2018) — the concept's source: the Superstudio reconstruction (network of energy and information; the plug-in microclimate; nomadism and transience; no inside or outside; the world as campfire-space); the claim that the energy landscape "exists today"; the installations as plug-in microenvironments; the ownership/privacy/access/capitalism caveat.
• Architecture or Techno-Utopia (Scott 2001) — the exhibition-history context: Tafuri's verdict on the Italian experimental architects' engagement with technology and communication as "another mass deception"; Superstudio's dystopian variants ("Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas," the 2,000-ton ceiling panel descending on rebellious inhabitants of "a perfectly functioning intelligent architectural machine") — the caution against reading the microevent as innocent utopia.
• Unitary Urbanism (Andreotti 1999) — the parallel programme: the Situationist unitary urbanism and Constant's New Babylon as the play-based, nomadic city-model against which Superstudio's infrastructure-utopia should be read.
• Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (Solomon 2018) — the unplanned-microclimate register: the microenvironment realized without the grid, as the spontaneous product of use — "Cool air is not the only atmosphere generated by the adjacent pubs: the smell of beer, cigarettes, and grilling beef, the sounds of generic rock and roll, English-language chatter, and clinking glasses form a microclimate distinct from the local street market just a block away." Where Superstudio's microclimate is plugged and provided, Hong Kong's is accumulated and socioeconomic — the pub's cooled, scented, sounding bubble as the Lan Kwai Fong crowd's microenvironment ("a crowd of tourists and Western expatriates gathers on a street of steep steps in much the same way"), counterposed to "the local street market just a block away." The concept's political read: what Superstudio promised as universal provision, Hong Kong delivers as stratification — every microclimate a class or cultural boundary (smellscape, atmospheric-politics).

Open Questions

• Is the microevent a spatial model (an architecture of events) or an anti-model (the dissolution of architecture into infrastructure)? Superstudio proposed "a landscape devoid of any enclosure, envelope, or environmental membrane" — can interior architecture claim a concept whose ideal is the interior's abolition?
• The chapter's historical contrast is the concept's sharpest edge: Superstudio's grid presupposed egalitarian provision; today's "complex and contradictory politics of the grid… rais[es] issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism." Is the contemporary microenvironment (harvested feeds retransmitted as urban ambience) Superstudio's model fulfilled or inverted?
• Scott's dossier includes Superstudio's dystopian self-readings (the descending 2,000-ton ceiling panel of "Twelve Cautionary Tales") — was the microevent always irony, a polemical exacerbation of infrastructure logic (as Aureli reads it), and does Gattegno & Johnson's earnest revival miss the satire or complete it?
• What is the relation between Superstudio's microevent and Constant's New Babylon sector — two nomad utopias of the same years, one built from prefabricated sectors, one from pure energy — and which better survives the reality of the contemporary grid?
• The grotto register holds the event space exceptional ("outside the normal condition"); the microevent generalizes the event to everywhere and anywhen ("triggered at any time in any location on the grid"). Are event-space and microevent two poles of one concept — exception vs. totalization — and can a designer design for both?