Technologies: The Spatial Agency of Digital Praxis

Author: Erin Carraher Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 17 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge, 2018) Raw file: raw/chapters/carraher_2018-technologies-the-spatial-agency-of-digital-praxis.md

Summary

Carraher's chapter argues that computational design and digital fabrication possess a distinctive spatial agency that modernism's homogeneous "universal space" suppressed: where the Modern Movement standardized space into a neutrality that "made architecture disappear by attempting to hide its effects and power," digital praxis — computation, fabrication, and open-source maker communities — enables heterogeneous, active space (Hight, Hensel, and Menges's term: space "ordered through differential relationships between diverse systems") that "proudly displays its dynamism" and can "empower" inhabitants to engage their spatial environments in new ways. Against the claim that digital tools have produced only "exquisite objects" with "rather simple, cave-like interior space" (Allen), the chapter insists that the economically decisive fact — the cost of nonstandard design is "not historically grounded, but rather… the legacy of the previous generation's technological advances in standardized construction techniques" — makes customizable interior architecture newly viable for "an audience beyond the technocratic elite," if the dialogue moves past "process-driven fetishization and formal results." The chapter contributes to Marinic's Reader a seventeenth register of interior architecture: the discipline as a social-empowerment agent, whose digitally designed and fabricated spaces must consciously stage the reciprocal relation between human agent and spatial agent.

Key Claims

Modernism idealized "a type of homogenous space that was a universal space – one of the key paradigms for establishing the desired democratic space"; its designers conceived for "the ubiquitous everyday man (exchangeable with every other man and woman of the same class, and in most cases, the same race)."
Gropius (1934) framed modernist space as an intellectual achievement beyond economy: "the intellectual achievement which has made possible a new spatial vision – for whereas the practical side of building is a matter of construction and materials, the very nature of architecture makes it dependent on the mastery of space" (pp. 62–63).
"Its desire for egalitarianism turned to standardization, and standardization made architecture disappear by attempting to hide its effects and power" — modernism's neutrality was an ideology that concealed architecture's agency.
Digital practice "posits an alternative proposition to modernist practice. Its tools enable it to swap modernist universalism for cultural relativism": CNC technologies encourage "mass customization to adapt designs for particular sites, particular programs, and particular clients," pushing designers toward "plurality, diversity, difference, and uniqueness" and toward "active space, which does not hide itself but proudly displays its dynamism."
Joan Ockman (quoted) reads form's opposing tendencies — "duck versus decorated shed or blob versus box" — as instruments that "stabilize or… destabilize an existing spatial order"; within modernism's rationalist ethos "organic or expressionist architecture functioned as an explosive challenge to the norm" (Ockman 2004, p. 234).
Modernists "extended designed space to a segment of Western classes… but in doing so they often created built environments that feigned neutrality, but in fact imposed a heavy-handed formal structure that overwrote the local context."
The economic hinge: "In the case of interior architecture, the limits of economically determined design decisions driven by the cost of nonstandard designs are not historically grounded, but rather, represent the legacy of the previous generation's technological advances in standardized construction techniques" — the normalization of building components developed at the end of the Industrial Revolution. Digitally fueled customizable interior constructs are therefore now "economically viable to serve an audience beyond the technocratic elite."
Forty years of digital work "has not yet been fully realized in programmatic, structural, or environmental autonomy": most projects "remain in the realm of figurative objects, articulated surfaces, or full-scale prototypes… without engaging with the social and spatial dimensions of how such forms differentiate space."
Stan Allen's three phases of digital engagement (from c. 1990): (1) digitizing the drafting process, then early adopters exploring; (2) formal speculation — Gehry Technologies adopting Catia and Maya from automotive, aeronautical, and shipbuilding industries, and "blobs"; (3) the current "strategic and operative" phase, introducing "feedback into the formal development system that takes into account material, manufacturing, economic, performative, and social inputs."
Allen's critique of the second phase: software "present their architectures within a perspectival frame and an orthographic coordinate system," producing "exquisite objects that represent formal and material complexity, but that produce rather simple, cave-like interior space and undefined relationships to external conditions."
Branko Kolarevic's tool-knowledge thesis: "Knowing the production capabilities and availability of particular digitally driven fabrication equipment enables architects to design specifically for the capabilities of those machines" — deep tool knowledge is necessary but "potentially limiting to designers through their predetermined tools and techniques."
A natural-systems/performative strand accompanies the formal strand: Philip Beesley's Hylozoic Veil (an "artificial forest" of biomorphic fronds, filters, and proximity sensors responding to museum-goers); Doris Kim Sung's thermobimetal skins ("two metals with different thermal expansion rates laminated together") creating natural ventilation; David Benjamin's Hy-Fi (2014 PS1 winner) of "farm waste and a cultured fungus" bricks — biodegradable structural modules.
Ockman's "Bilbao Effect" (quoted via the chapter): formally expressive, digitally enabled architecture "being used as an economic stimulator through use of 'starchitect' power to stimulate tourism"; "The aura of Architecture (capital 'A') is total; there is no disappearing act on the part of the author" (p. 231). Bilbao's lesson: "a building in a provincial locale can have a radical cultural effect only when it is cosmopolitan enough to enter into a wider conversation" (p. 230) — and its criticism: "Its exterior was privileged to the regrettable detriment of its interior." "In short, Bilbao embodies the quintessential notion of a spatially challenged form."
Well-intentioned design agency can fail socially: in "disaster relief housing… the well-intentioned 'white savior' often ends up doing more harm than good."
Space entered the architectural vocabulary "only since the 1890s, when it emerged from the lexicon of German philosophers"; Adrian Forty defines space as both thing and concept, and names three primary modernist definitions: space as enclosure, space as continuum, space as extension of the body.
Lefebvre ties the Bauhaus to the production of space: "The Bauhaus people understood that things could not be created independently of each other in space, whether movable (furniture) or fixed (buildings), without taking into account their interrelationships and their relationship to the whole" (1991, p. 124) — connecting Fordist modes of production to spatial production; the design serves as "a mediator… between mental activity (invention) and social activity (realization)" (pp. 27–28).
Hight, Hensel, and Menges propose that the space of our time is heterogeneous — "ordered through differential relationships between diverse systems leading to a multiplicity of atmospheres" — which is "not neutral but active," and affects change "through the empowerment of others, allowing them to engage in their spatial environments in ways previously unknown or unavailable to them" (Awan, Schneider, and Till 2011, p. 32).
Their diagnosis: "Our repertoire of spatial concepts… remain relatively underdeveloped compared to the formal innovations, programmatic savvy, and critical sophistications of the past decades" — space is modern architecture's constitutive "blind spot."
Agency (via Giddens): "Agents are neither completely free as individuals nor are they completely entrapped by structure. Spatial agents are neither impotent nor all-powerful; they are negotiators of existing conditions in order to partially reform them."
Agency (via Dewey): "The organism is a force, not a transparency" — experiences are neither purely mental nor objective; the environment is "both physical and social," and those acting in it affect the system itself.
Praxis (Awan, Schneider, and Till): against tradition's "predetermined action" emerges "a critical practice or rather to use the accepted word – 'praxis' – which starts with an open-ended evaluation of the particular external conditions, out of which action arises with no predetermined outcome, but with the intention to be transformative" (p. 29).
Three contemporary exemplars of digital spatial agency: Marc Fornes/THEVERYMANY's installations (a new interiority "both heterogeneous and homogeneous"); Achim Menges's Institute of Computational Design (digital tools "reengage designers with the natural properties of the materials they use"); and WikiHouse — open-source, digitally driven design providing "clients who would not otherwise be able to afford a designer's services" the ability "to adapt and fabricate their own home."
The contemporary relation: "Modernist space may have allowed greater agency for inhabitants because of its neutrality, but contemporary space engages the public in a relationship where the human agent and the spatial agent are equal. This reciprocal engagement extends beyond just the user to the designer, who is also an active character in its production."

Connections

Concepts: digital-architecture, computational-design, digital-fabrication, mass-customization, spatial-agency, praxis, heterogeneous-space, homogeneous-space, interactive-architecture, modernism, space, bilbao-effect, star-architecture, spectacle, authorship, self-build, right-to-design, production-stream, fabrication, critical-architecture, representation, interior-architecture

Authors: carraher-erin (author), marinic-gregory (volume editor), lefebvre-henri (quoted extensively), gehry-frank (Gehry Technologies, Bilbao)

Debates: static-vs-dynamic-architecture (homogeneous/hidden vs. heterogeneous/displayed space), universalism-vs-relativism (modernist universalism swapped for cultural relativism via mass customization), power-and-space (space that hides vs. displays its power; architects as agents of spatialization), critical-vs-projective (Hays's between-culture-and-form agency; Picon's renewed criticality), critical-theory-and-architecture (the Marxist legacy of design agency)

Related source notes: source-notes/manack-2018-fabricating-interiority (digital fabrication as interior architecture's instrument), source-notes/satterfield-swackhamer-2018-swimming-upstream (production-stream agency), source-notes/taylor-2018-shape-shifting-dynamic-design (the dynamic interior), source-notes/qureshi-2018-spatial-therapies (digital technology's disciplinary application), source-notes/teston-2018-politicizing-the-interior (access to design as a right), source-notes/schumacher-2008-parametricism-as-style (the parametric claim the chapter implicitly counters), source-notes/seabrook-2009-the-abstractionist (Gehry's digital pipeline), source-notes/till-wigglesworth-2001-future-is-hairy (agency against the hero-author myth), source-notes/schneiderman-2018-inside-the-prefab-house (standardized construction's legacy)

Direct Quotes

"The past forty years of progressive architectural design and discourse have emphasized autonomous form on the one hand and programmatic determination on the other, while lacking a similarly rich exploration of the space and spatial complexity in which either occurs." (Hight, Hensel, and Menges, 2009 — chapter epigraph)

"Computational design has freed designers from the convenience of the right angle and the economy of the straight line."

"Architecture is always between ideology and utopia. Today we are faced with a renewed question of criticality, because architecture is in a real need to redefine its political agency and to reposition itself … I think that what we're looking for is a new ideology, a new standard regime or belief about architecture's agency in the world at large." (Antoine Picon, in Lash, Picon, and Crawford 2009, qtd. in chapter)

"The idea of rationalization, which many people aver is the outstanding characteristic of the new architecture, is only its purifying role. The other aspect, the satisfaction of the human soul, is just as important as the material." (Gropius 1934, pp. 62–63)

"What is far more important than this structural economy and its functional emphasis is the intellectual achievement which has made possible a new spatial vision – for whereas the practical side of building is a matter of construction and materials, the very nature of architecture makes it dependent on the mastery of space." (Gropius 1934, pp. 62–63)

"Its desire for egalitarianism turned to standardization, and standardization made architecture disappear by attempting to hide its effects and power."

"Historically, these opposing tendencies [of duck versus decorated shed or blob versus box] tend to be mobilized in order to either stabilize or to destabilize an existing spatial order. Thus, within the context of the rationalist ethos of modernism, organic or expressionist architecture functioned as an explosive challenge to the norm." (Ockman 2004, p. 234)

"Modernists may have extended designed space to a segment of Western classes that previously could not afford to have access to it, but in doing so they often created built environments that feigned neutrality, but in fact imposed a heavy-handed formal structure that overwrote the local context."

"In the case of interior architecture, the limits of economically determined design decisions driven by the cost of nonstandard designs are not historically grounded, but rather, represent the legacy of the previous generation's technological advances in standardized construction techniques."

"Knowing the production capabilities and availability of particular digitally driven fabrication equipment enables architects to design specifically for the capabilities of those machines." (Kolarevic 2004, pp. 32–33)

"However we have yet to fully engage the complex spatial organizations that are made possible perhaps because the same software often present their architectures within a perspectival frame and an orthographic coordinate system. As a result, such techniques too often produce exquisite objects that represent formal and material complexity, but that produce rather simple, cave-like interior space and undefined relationships to external conditions." (Allen 2012)

"The aura of Architecture (capital 'A') is total; there is no disappearing act on the part of the author." (Ockman 2004, p. 231)

"Possibly a building in a provincial locale can have a radical cultural effect only when it is cosmopolitan enough to enter into a wider conversation." (Ockman 2004, p. 230)

"In short, Bilbao embodies the quintessential notion of a spatially challenged form."

"In order to know all we can about architecture we must be able to understand each instance of architecture, not as a passive agent of culture in its dominant ideological, institutional, and historical forms, nor as a detached, disinfected object. Rather, we must understand it as actively and continually occupying a cultural place – as an architectural intention with ascertainable political and intellectual consequences." (Hays 1984)

"Our repertoire of spatial concepts and our ability to understand and work with them remain relatively underdeveloped compared to the formal innovations, programmatic savvy, and critical sophistications of the past decades." (Hight, Hensel, and Menges 2009, p. 11)

"A willingness to connive in a confusion between these two unrelated properties seems to be an essential qualification for talking about architectural space." (Forty 2013, pp. 256–275)

"Since architecture is the art of spatial enclosure, we must emphasize the architectonic nature of space, both in a constructive and a decorative sense. For this reason, a building should not be considered primarily from the outside." (Berlage, p. 152)

"The Bauhaus people understood that things could not be created independently of each other in space, whether movable (furniture) or fixed (buildings), without taking into account their interrelationships and their relationship to the whole." (Lefebvre 1991, p. 124)

"The design serves as a mediator – itself of great fidelity – between mental activity (invention) and social activity (realization); and it is deployed in space." (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 27–28)

"[Heterogeneous space is] ordered through differential relationships between diverse systems leading to a multiplicity of atmospheres." (Hight, Hensel, and Menges 2009)

"Agents are neither completely free as individuals nor are they completely entrapped by structure. Spatial agents are neither impotent nor all-powerful; they are negotiators of existing conditions in order to partially reform them." (Giddens 1987, p. 220, via Awan, Schneider, and Till 2011, p. 31)

"The organism is a force, not a transparency." (Dewey, p. 246)

"Against this emerges a critical practice or rather to use the accepted word – 'praxis' – which starts with an open-ended evaluation of the particular external conditions, out of which action arises with no predetermined outcome, but with the intention to be transformative." (Awan, Schneider, and Till 2011, p. 29)

"'Spatial Agency' brings up a series of fundamental questions about how and for whom the built environment is produced, and probes conventional frameworks or old-established rules and regulations… individuals and groups 'bypass', 'penetrate', or 'hijack' institutions or other organizational structures; they work 'open source'…" (Awan, Schneider, and Till 2011, pp. 81–82)

"an architect is trained to have an intimate and perhaps a certain expert knowledge about space, even if it remains unarticulated as such." (Hight, Hensel, and Menges 2009, pp. 24–25)

"Modernist space may have allowed greater agency for inhabitants because of its neutrality, but contemporary space engages the public in a relationship where the human agent and the spatial agent are equal."

"The disruptive stage of this advancement is over, and now the work of understanding how to better harness these tools for the social good, and make visible the active space that is produced, is beginning."

"Digital fabrication is the way in which designers are able to produce a customized design response to conventional interiors in an economically competitive way."

Open Questions

Carraher's closing reciprocity thesis — the human agent and the spatial agent as "equal" — is stated but not demonstrated: what built work actually shows inhabitants engaging "their spatial environments in ways previously unknown or unavailable to them" on equal terms with the spatial agent?
If the disruptive stage of digital advancement "is over," what would "programmatic, structural, or environmental autonomy" for digitally produced interior architecture actually look like — and why have forty years of installations not achieved it?
Carraher accepts that "the tools themselves become more accessible to the populations in need of design without the mediator of a designer" is the alternative to designers "parameterizing" qualitative aspects of space — but can spatial experience be parameterized at all, or does that project repeat modernism's standardization of the unstandardizable?
The chapter's social-agency program (Kéré, Design Corps, Rural Studio, WikiHouse) runs on open-source, low-tech access — yet its exemplars (Fornes, Menges) are laboratory-scale installations. Is digital spatial agency's social promise structurally tied to fabrication capital the underserved lack?
The chapter credits WikiHouse with environmental responsiveness — does open-source digital self-build deliver the "equilibrium between human and inanimate agents," or the "white savior" failure it warns against in disaster-relief housing?

Notes

Pagination: the raw chapter file carries no page numbers of its own (the Marinic Reader pagination is not marked). Direct quotes are given with the original source pagination where the chapter's endnotes supply it (Gropius 1934, pp. 61–63; Ockman 2004, pp. 230–234; Kolarevic 2004, pp. 32–33; Lefebvre 1991, pp. 27–28, 124; Hight/Hensel/Menges 2009, pp. 11, 24–25; Awan/Schneider/Till 2011, pp. 29–32, 81–82; Giddens 1987, p. 220; Dewey 1934, p. 246; Berlage, p. 152; Forty 2013, pp. 256–275); chapter-internal quotes are unpaginated.
Special thanks in the chapter's notes to Shundana Yusaf (University of Utah) "for her guidance and editing" on the Modernist-space section.
The OCR of the Hight/Hensel/Menges long quote reads "agents for the specialization of power" where Lefebvre's phrase is normally "spatialization of power"; quoted verbatim per raw text.
Chapter's exemplar roster: Gehry (Guggenheim Bilbao, 1997), SHoP (Dunescape, PS1 2000), Foreign Office Architects (Yokohama Port Terminal, 2002), Marc Fornes/THEVERYMANY (The Situation Room, Storefront for Art and Architecture), Achim Menges (ICD climate-responsive structures), Gramazio Kohler (Flight Assembled Architecture, FRAC Centre Orléans), Philip Beesley (Hylozoic Veil), Doris Kim Sung (thermobimetal), David Benjamin/The Living (Hy-Fi, PS1 2014), WikiHouse.