From ambient environments to sentient spaces

Author: Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson (Future Cities Lab) Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 20 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge, 2018) Raw file: raw/chapters/gattegno-johnson_2018-ambient-environments-sentient-spaces.md

Summary

Gattegno and Johnson — the founding partners of the San Francisco experimental design studio Future Cities Lab — trace an urban design trajectory "from ambient environments to sentient spaces": from Reyner Banham's Standard of Living Package (1965) and Superstudio's "Description of the Microevent/Microenvironment" (for Emilio Ambasz's canonical MoMA exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, 1972) to their own three public installations — Lightswarm, Datagrove, and Murmur Wall. The chapter's central argument: the campfire — Banham's shelter that "interfer[es] with the local meteorology" rather than avoiding it — is the prototype of a spatial model that dispenses with the enclosing shell and produces interiority instead as gradients: "a gradient of multiple environmental qualities with different degrees of interiority." Contemporary installations plugged into today's "network of energy and information" revive this model as sentient spaces — surfaces that "can sense, compute, respond, and interact," harvesting the city's sounds, social media feeds, and trending searches to produce "multiple and overlapping interiorities that may be applied at various scales" — while the data grid they plug into raises the political questions Superstudio's utopian energy landscape never had to face: "Who owns the data? Who disperses it? What data is represented and how is it selected?"

Pagination note: the raw file carries no page numbers; quotations from Banham's "A House Is Not a Home" (Art in America, 1965), Superstudio's "Description of the Microevent/Microenvironment," and Felicity D. Scott's Architecture or Techno-Utopia carry the page numbers given in the chapter's own notes (Banham pp. 70, 73–75; Superstudio pp. 242, 244, 246, 248, 249; Scott p. 126; Ambasz catalogue pp. 12, 20). The chapter's note 1 titles the Banham essay "A House Is Not a Home" — the title of the well-known 1965 Art in America essay is "A Home Is Not a House"; the note's title is reported here as the chapter gives it.

Key Claims

The "mechanization of the American interior landscape" is diagnosed through Banham: the thinness of the building shell creates an "informally planned interior" that must be mechanically heated and lit — the "mechanical invasion" of the interior.
Banham's Standard of Living Package proposed an alternative bundling of mechanical and technological systems letting the shell grow "even thinner (almost disappear)" and the interior "larger (almost endless) and more informal" — plugged into an automobile, "the quintessential enabler of the American Dream," and functioning as "an atmosphere maker."
Banham described two kinds of shelter: one avoiding environment in its entirety ("under a rock, tree, tent, or roof"), one "actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a campfire" — and argued the campfire has "unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability."
The campfire experience "suggests a gradient of multiple environmental qualities with different degrees of interiority" — spatial zones used in multiple ways, "the subtle creation of multiple interiors implied by simple environmental and, by extension, experiential variation."
Read through this framework, the Standard of Living Package "was a sentient structure, one able to sense its surroundings and provide multiple gradients of space surrounding it" — an "energy provider" with "energy" expanded to mean "an essential part of the infrastructure of our daily lives," including "emotive support."
Banham realized "the dream of the un-house," stood behind what "could be read as 'anti-architectural,'" and sought "to dissolve architecture and the typical envelope between interior and exterior entirely, allowing space to become a nomadic and transient living system."
Superstudio radicalized the dissolution: "a life without objects," a landscape of energy and infrastructure subsumed into the grid, "devoid of any enclosure, envelope, or environmental membrane" — where "nomadism, impermanence, mobility, and transience were the norm" and "no inside or outside could exist."
Superstudio's "Description of the Microevent/Microenvironment" envisioned "a network of energy and information extending to every properly inhabited area" — "the whole city as a network of energy and communications" — where "spontaneous events and crowd gatherings could be triggered at any time in any location on the grid."
The Superstudio 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'" — and that energy landscape "exists today and is available to be plugged into at the scale of the interior, the building, and the city."
Future Cities Lab's Lightswarm is an interactive light installation "in a state of perpetual flux": sound-sensing "spiders" attached to glass panels "transform the facade into a large-scale urban sensor, an instrument to sense the city, visualize its auditory pulse, and amplify its latent energies into cascades of light"; real-time data feeds "a swarming algorithm" — "The resulting form is an artificially intelligent facade – a smart surface that can sense, compute, respond, and interact with its surroundings."
Lightswarm negotiates two grounds (museum lobby and public park): "The activity inside the museum is presented to the public, and reciprocally, the city invades the museum through patterns of light" — while passersby "can simply clap their hands to trigger a swarm of light to play around them for a while, circumnavigating the system and giving them the ability to take over."
Lightswarm creates "variable degrees and zones of occupation" — describable "as multiple interiors, multiple degrees and zones of activation that range in scale, scope, and perception as multi-layered, nested interiorities."
Datagrove "thrives on information from its urban environment," rendering "invisible data and atmospheric phenomena into variable intensities of light and sound"; it functions as "a social media whispering wall," aggregating "local trending Twitter feeds from a one-mile radius and whisper[ing] these back through speakers and liquid crystal displays woven into its framework" — providing "shelter and a place of calm to contemplate data streams."
Murmur Wall is "an artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking, and feeling" — proactively harvesting "local online activity via trending search terms on multiple search engines" to anticipate "what will soon matter most to the city," providing "a place for the city to share, indulge, and reflect on the real-time desires and anxieties of its citizens."
Both installations create four levels of engagement: "a sonic and textual range in which to hear and read the information transmitted, an ambient range of immersion… an atmospheric range of mood, color, light, and effect… and an urban scale of looking down or through the installations at the city."
Via Felicity D. Scott on Ambasz's "anti-object" position: the commissioned environments were "closer to his (Ambasz's) ideal of active critical participation," relating to users as "an ensemble of interrelated processes, whose interaction results in constantly changing patterns of relationships," refusing "to adopt a fixed shape" — the origin of today's "notions of feedback and loops of interdependency."
Via Scott on Ambasz again: the domestic realm as a site of introducing "forms and scripts" from the larger public realm into a responsive space, answering "our desire for continuous participation in the self-shaping and self-management of everyday existence" — "Key in the ability for these projects to gain meaning is participation and active engagement which allows them to shape and change daily life."
The installations are "closer to Superstudio's microevents than to the remote 'happy islands' that exist in pure isolation… or the magical 'talismans' that exist for purely symbolic and representational terms" (Ambasz's categories, via Scott).
Superstudio's polemic — "a full and outright rejection of production and consumption," "a life with no objects to be owned" relying on "an egalitarian and all-providing energy infrastructure" — stands "in stark contrast to the complex and contradictory politics of the grid we plug into today, raising issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism."
The data-political questions the chapter poses: "Who owns the data? Who disperses it? What data is represented and how is it selected?" — demanding "ways to circumvent, interrupt, and question the information represented."
Murmur Wall's whispers are the built answer: messages sent from anywhere through an online interface, "analogous to graffiti on an urban surface," transmitted as blue streams of light and text overlaying the harvested feeds — "The whispers counter the seemingly representational nature of the installation and explore ways to make it an active participant in the conversations happening around it."
The three installations "endeavor to create microevents and/or microenvironments around them that aspire to be 'campfires' in the urban landscape," bringing "people together in varying degrees of proximity and intimacy" — "Ultimately, these works create multiple and overlapping interiorities that may be applied at a various scales."
The culminating thesis: "These installations map a future trajectory where gradients of environment begin gaining intelligence through their seamless integration with data – they become sentient. Sentience suggests an inherent ability of an object to perceive, sense, and feel its surrounding environment in a subjective and highly personal manner."
Against the flattened screen: "Rather than continuing to flatten, minimize, and strip the representation of information, what if it became robust, thick, deep, and part of the everyday spaces we interact with?" — a territory "where these qualities of ambience and sentience are becoming hybridized and spatial," in which "rooms, buildings, and cities become sentient."

Connections

Concepts: sentient-spaces · microevent-microenvironment · the-campfire · multiple-interiorities · interactive-architecture · atmosphere · ambient-conditioning · event-space · heterogeneous-space · digital-architecture · interiority · inside-outside-dialectic · boundaries · enclosure · privacy · communicative-capitalism · consumerism · play · everyday-life · new-babylon

Authors: gattegno-nataly-johnson-jason-kelly · marinic-gregory (editor) · discussed in text: banham-reyner (the Standard of Living Package, the campfire, the "un-house") · scott-felicity-d (Architecture or Techno-Utopia, on Ambasz) · Superstudio (the radical-architecture collective; not paged) · Emilio Ambasz (curator of Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, MoMA 1972; not paged)

Debates: static-vs-dynamic-architecture (the campfire as dynamism-as-gradient antecedent; Lightswarm's "perpetual flux")

Related source notes: Architecture or Techno-Utopia (Scott 2001) — the source of the chapter's Ambasz reading ("active critical participation," the "anti-object," the foreclosure of the experimental avant-garde) · Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the sibling chapter's "sentient environment" (Beesley's Hylozoic Soil) and the grotto register of ambient conditioning · Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the dynamic-interior paradigm and Glanville's stimulus-response critique this chapter's installations must face · Inside out (Webb 2018) — the Banham-lineage kin: the Drive-in House drawn from the same 1965 "Letter from America" moment as the Standard of Living Package · Communicative Capitalism (Dean 2005) — the circulation-forecloses-politics frame for the chapter's data-ownership questions · Unitary Urbanism (Andreotti 1999) — the Situationist nomadic-city cousin of Superstudio's grid (Constant's New Babylon)

Direct Quotes

"It was an atmosphere maker, 'breathing out warm air along the ground … radiating soft light and Dionne Warwick in heart-warming stereo … this could do something for a woodland glade or creek side rock that Playboy could ever do for its penthouse.'" (Banham, quoted in the chapter — note 1: "A House Is Not a Home," Art in America 2, 1965, pp. 70, 73)

"under a rock, tree, tent, or roof" (Banham, quoted — note 1, p. 70) / "actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a campfire" (Banham, quoted)

"unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability" (Banham on the campfire, quoted — notes 2–3, pp. 74–75)

"was a sentient structure, one able to sense its surroundings and provide multiple gradients of space surrounding it." (on the Standard of Living Package)

"the dream of the un-house" (Banham, quoted)

"We can imagine a network of energy and information extending to every properly inhabited area" (Superstudio, quoted — note 4, p. 242)

"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 …" (Superstudio, quoted — note 8, pp. 242, 244)

"The resulting form is an artificially intelligent facade – a smart surface that can sense, compute, respond, and interact with its surroundings." (on Lightswarm)

"The activity inside the museum is presented to the public, and reciprocally, the city invades the museum through patterns of light."

"circumnavigating the system and giving them the ability to take over" (on passersby at Lightswarm)

"These could be described as multiple interiors, multiple degrees and zones of activation that range in scale, scope, and perception as multi-layered, nested interiorities."

"It is an artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking, and feeling." (on Murmur Wall)

"As a continuously evolving interface, the Murmur Wall provides a place for the city to share, indulge, and reflect on the real-time desires and anxieties of its citizens."

"closer to his (Ambasz's) ideal of active critical participation" (Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia, quoted — note 10, p. 126)

"an ensemble of interrelated processes, whose interaction results in constantly changing patterns of relationships" (Ambasz, quoted via Scott — note 12, catalogue p. 20)

"our desire for continuous participation in the self-shaping and self-management of everyday existence" (Ambasz, quoted via Scott — note 14)

"This is in stark contrast to the complex and contradictory politics of the grid we plug into today, raising issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism. Who owns the data? Who disperses it? What data is represented and how is it selected?"

"The whispers counter the seemingly representational nature of the installation and explore ways to make it an active participant in the conversations happening around it." (on Murmur Wall's graffiti-whispers)

"These installations map a future trajectory where gradients of environment begin gaining intelligence through their seamless integration with data – they become sentient."

"Sentience suggests an inherent ability of an object to perceive, sense, and feel its surrounding environment in a subjective and highly personal manner."

"Rather than continuing to flatten, minimize, and strip the representation of information, what if it became robust, thick, deep, and part of the everyday spaces we interact with?"

"Ultimately, these works create multiple and overlapping interiorities that may be applied at a various scales."

Open Questions

Sentience is defined as perception "in a subjective and highly personal manner" by an object — does the term anthropomorphize infrastructure (the thermostat writ large, per Glanville's stimulus-response critique), or name a genuinely new spatial condition in which subjectivity is distributed between surface, sensor, algorithm, and inhabitant?
The chapter's central tension is historical, not technical: Superstudio's grid presupposed "an egalitarian and all-providing energy infrastructure," while today's grid "rais[es] issues of ownership, privacy, access, and capitalism." Can the plug-in sentient interior escape its infrastructure's politics — or is every "microclimate by plug" already a commodity relation?
"What data is represented and how is it selected?" — the harvested feeds are selected by platform algorithms, not by the city. Is the "large-scale urban sensor" a public instrument or a platform's loudspeaker wearing a facade?
Can gradient-based interiority ("multiple interiors… multi-layered, nested interiorities") do the work Grosz's enframing thesis demands of a boundary — produce an inside without an enclosure — or does Superstudio's "no inside or outside" limit-case dissolve the interior discipline's object altogether?
Murmur Wall's graffiti-whispers "counter the seemingly representational nature of the installation" — is tagging a data-harvesting wall an adequate counter-politics to the harvesting itself, or the alibi that makes the wall participatory in Dean's circulation-forecloses-politics sense?
If "rooms, buildings, and cities become sentient," what happens to the inhabitant's own sentience — is the "subjective and highly personal manner" of the sensing surface a rival to, a mirror of, or a replacement for the occupant's interiority?