Shape shifting: Interior architecture and dynamic design

Author: Mark Taylor Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 7 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/taylor-2018-shape-shifting-dynamic-design.md

Summary

Mark Taylor (co-editor of Intimus) surveys how the relationship between interior architecture and interiority is being reconfigured by digital, electronic, and interactive technologies. The chapter sets out two established approaches — Graeme Brooker and Sally Stone's conservationist adaptation of existing buildings, and Sashi Caan's atmospheric, psychological account of the interior — and then argues that both are being overtaken by a third, dynamic paradigm: the technologically animate interior of responsive surfaces, distributed intelligence, and real-time data. Drawing at length on Marc Augé's Non-Places (via the Parisian businessman Pierre Dupont's journey from cash dispenser to business-class seat), on Ole Bouman's "liquid" architecture of ubiquitous computing, and on built cases (dECOi's Aegis Hyposurface, NOX's Freshwater Pavilion, Kengo Kuma's T-Room, ONL's Digital Pavilion Korea and Muscle), Taylor concludes that under the dynamic paradigm "the relationship between interior architecture and interiority is dynamic and mobile," the data-driven environment is inherently unpredictable, and the supermodern interior will "cease to exist in its current format" unless alternate receptacles for interiority and dwelling are found.

Key Claims

The term "interior architecture" dates to 1924 (per Sashi Caan), 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" — the adaptive-reuse alignment.
Brooker and Stone "established a conservationist approach that revolved around themes of preservation, restoration, renovation, and remodeling," aligning case studies with "an analytical examination that sought coherence and symbolic association between the new and old parts of the building."
Brooker and Stone work rationally "through materials, form, geometry, and so on," whereas Caan "recognizes that atmosphere, feeling, and spatial presence are factors affecting the perception of an interior" — two rival epistemologies of the interior.
Taylor's gloss on interiority: "What might be called 'interiority'… offers a connection to psychological life, memory, closeness, and intimacy" — the psychological correlate the discipline must now reconcile with technology. See interiority.
"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."
Via Augé: supermodern space — supermarkets, train stations, airports — is "reductively generated self-similar and homogenized," "replicated indiscriminately across the globe," the product of "corporate capitalism, business economics, or plain 'efficiency diagrams.'" See non-places.
In non-places "clients are scrutinized, identified, and directed by sensors, machines, and card readers" — silent, contractual interchange replacing personal interaction.
Via Graham and Marvin: non-places are "sites that are wholly constructed and controlled to support the mobility of global commodities"; "intense concentrations of networked infrastructure" construct "supermodern spaces of flow" — "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."
Augé's prologue narrative (Pierre Dupont: cash dispenser → tollbooth → autoroutes → Roissy check-in → duty-free → Espace 2000 business-class seat → "alone at last") dramatizes a life spent "using cash machines, traveling on motorways, wandering around supermarkets, waiting in airports and hotels, and interacting with TVs, game consoles, and computers" — spaces that advertise that "we are perpetually connected… when, in reality, we are profoundly disconnected."
Via Bingham: disconnectedness 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."
Via Fuller: non-places address their users through textual injunctions ("do not eat in the train," "please present boarding pass and passport") that address "a virtual 'average man' subject to a series of silent exchanges and injunctions… where contractual modes of interaction are sharply defined and textually mediated."
Via Bouman: we are in "an architectural age in which people, rather than place, become the interface," aiming at "merging digital and physical environments in a single interface"; ubiquitous computing and "asynchronous structures" challenge architecture "as a device that measures specific events and moments in time"; in a world 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." See interactive-architecture.
Via Dunne and Raby: design research into the material/immaterial link pursues "the poetic and sensual rather than the technical or utilitarian," using pervasive computing "to produce a more intangible or ephemeral interface design that makes visible the invisible or evokes immaterial sensuality."
Via Weinstock: "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 distributed intelligence and responsive material systems buildings should change "internal parameters and performances in relation to the life of their inhabitants and events in the external world." See terrain-vague.
The Aegis Hyposurface (Mark Goulthorpe, dECOi) is "the world's first responsive architectural surface": designed as an interactive artwork for the Birmingham Hippodrome Theatre foyer, an array of sensors (video cameras, microphones) feeds a network of pistons that physically deforms the surface, bringing "Aegis into a conversation with whoever triggered a response." Mark Burry described its undulation as making "one feel a little seasick" — "spatially disturbing, while questioning the seeming solidity of the Aegis Hyposurface's metal surface."
Kengo Kuma's T-Room (2005, Alternative Paradise exhibition, Kanazawa 21st Century Museum): an air-filled translucent membrane "animated by variations in air pressure" — not a stimulus/response network but "a movement cycle which nevertheless forced a more intimate relationship between bodies, as well as between body and architecture."
Via Glanville (cybernetics): the oldest building "intelligence" is thermostatic heating; such systems "perform tricks" and are stimulus-response, not interactive; even the smart fridge "is not truly interactive and is probably closer to a servicing device." "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."
Against Glanville's skepticism: new interactive technologies, "principally operating through the Web of Things, connect activation with performance," with "reciprocal relationships between data input (stimulus) and surface change (response)" effected through digital screens and mechanical systems alike.
Our presence in the world, "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')"; lives now "exist between digital and physical environments." See inside-outside-dialectic.
Wearable technologies move the interface onto the body: interaction occurs "through tactile and direct contact with the instruments located on the body" (Croci), meaning "the artificial or constructed environment might reconfigure itself depending on the social dynamics that are occurring."
Mobile digital technologies, new materials, and controllable structures "emphasize[] the distance between inhabitable space as a fixed architecture and as a flow of information"; architecture is now "a complex adaptive robotic system of interacting installations."
ONL's Digital Pavilion Korea (2006): a Voronoi cell structure "controlled and kinetically manipulated using actuators in the beams of the structural system"; ONL's earlier Muscle (2003): 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."
Central provocation: "if the supermodern 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 dynamic interior defined against both predecessors: the technologically driven animate architectural interior "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)" and "offers a dynamic exchange that changes both form and feedback such that no single reading is possible."
Bouman's paradigm challenge: the new way of thinking challenges "the classical worldview of architecture as a static, built placemaking device" — architecture is "no longer about people engaging with built architecture or a place, but… about wireless embedded technologies that 'reach you directly.'"
Temporal structure of the two paradigms: traditional architecture "is conceptualized as the desire to represent oneself beyond the present," a "recurrent process of time measured from the past through to the present anticipat[ing] a predictable future informed by stability"; "the data-driven environment, however, is inherently unpredictable, as its 'stability' is ever changing." See temporality.
Monumentality vs responsiveness: "monumental architecture has become the signifier of the ability to transcend death, because it seems to be eternal and claims durability and imperishability," whereas "the responsive environment has an immanent relationship to lived space" — collecting data and responding to patterns of use in real time.
Closing thesis: "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"; the dynamic interior "enables individuals and groups to sustain shared concepts of changes in meanings and values," such that "'time' is now inherently bound to design thinking" (via Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 221) — it "opens space for the transitory and transformative to resist traditional paradigms and ideologies."

Connections

Concepts: interior-architecture · interiority · non-places · interactive-architecture · adaptive-reuse · temporality · terrain-vague · inside-outside-dialectic · boundaries · dwelling · atmosphere · junkspace · capitalism · domestic-interior Authors: Mark Taylor · Gregory Marinic (ed.) · Marc Augé (non-places discussed at length) · Henri Lefebvre (closing citation, The Production of Space) · Rem Koolhaas (junkspace's author — the airport/mall condition Taylor's supermodern interior shares) Debates: static-vs-dynamic-architecture — the chapter's core contrast: classical static placemaking and monumental permanence vs the data-driven responsive environment · interior-design-vs-architecture — Caan's 1924 date, the Brooker & Stone/Caan contrast, and the dynamic paradigm as the discipline's newest self-definition · power-and-space — non-place control: sensors, card readers, barriers, and textual injunctions Related source notes: Taylor & Preston — Proximities — same author's naming of interiority as a theoretical cluster; this chapter develops interiority's technological reconfiguration · Qureshi — Spatial therapies — Qureshi's post-analog condition and "hybridized digital/analog space" is the therapeutic counterpart to Taylor's dynamic paradigm · Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — supplies the Brooker & Stone/alteration conception Taylor's dynamic interior defines itself against · Webb — Inside out — Webb's rotating drive-in drum and Taylor's actuated surfaces share the building-as-machine premise; Webb's driver-datum vs Taylor's sensor-driven environment · Bachelard — The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the digital/physical boundary (Weinstock's home as terrain vague) as a new register of the inside/outside dialectic · Jones & Moreno-Carranco — Megaprojects — cities as Augéan non-places · Wagiri et al. — Embodied Spaces in Digital Times — the digital mediation of spatial experience · Koolhaas — Logan Airport / Junkspace — the airport as the supermodern interior's paradigm case · Ardener — The Partition of Space — the gate-keeper's boundary, automated in the non-place's card readers and sensors

Direct Quotes

Page numbers are not available in the chapter text; quotes are located by section heading. Where the chapter's own endnotes give page numbers, these are noted.

"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." (§ opening)

"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." (§ opening)

"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." (§ opening)

"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." (§ opening)

"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." (§ opening)

"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.'" (§ opening, quoting Graham & Marvin)

"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." (§ opening)

"…spaces that advertised and encouraged the idea that 'we are perpetually connected… when, in reality, we are profoundly disconnected.'" (§ opening, quoting Augé via Bingham)

"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.'" (§ opening; Bingaman 2007, pp. 24–25)

"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.'" (§ opening, quoting Gillian Fuller)

"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.'" (§ opening)

"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.'" (§ opening, quoting Bouman)

"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." (§ "Intelligent systems")

"The Aegis Hyposurface, conceived by Mark Goulthorp of dECOi Architects, is the world's first responsive architectural surface." (§ "Intelligent systems")

"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.'" (§ "Intelligent systems")

"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." (§ "Intelligent systems")

"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." (§ "Intelligent systems," on Kuma's T-Room)

"He suggests that once such systems might have been thought of as intelligent, but only when such 'behavior seemed wondrous.'… 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.'" (§ "Intelligent systems"; Glanville 2001, p. 17)

"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." (§ "Network infrastructure")

"Such advances mean that the artificial or constructed environment might reconfigure itself depending on the social dynamics that are occurring." (§ "Network infrastructure")

"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." (§ "Network infrastructure")

"Moreover, if the supermodern 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." (§ "Network infrastructure")

"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." (§ "Network infrastructure")

"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.'" (§ "Network infrastructure," via Bouman)

"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." (§ "Network infrastructure")

"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." (§ "Network infrastructure")

"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." (§ "Network infrastructure")

"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." (§ "Network infrastructure"; final sentence quoting Lefebvre 1991, p. 221)

Open Questions

Does the dynamic paradigm replace the alteration conception (Brooker & Stone) or run parallel to it — is the responsive surface an interior architecture at all, or a new art-form that merely displaces the discipline's definitions of the interior?
If the supermodern interior "will cease to exist in its current format," what are the "alternate locations, sites, and environments as potential receptacles for interiority and dwelling"? Is interiority hosted by environments at all, or (per Augé's non-places) precisely what supermodern space abolishes?
Glanville's cybernetic criterion ("nowhere near interactive, let alone intelligent… clever tricks… to retain a static stability") targets the very projects Taylor presents (Aegis, ONL). Is the chapter's dynamic paradigm an empirical description of built reality or a speculative programme that Glanville's critique still holds hostage?
Weinstock's "home as terrain vague" between data worlds and personal space: does the smart home dissolve the domestic interior (domestic-interior) into infrastructure, and can Bachelard's intimate space survive distribution across "constantly unfolding data"?
If monumental permanence is the built form of the desire "to represent oneself beyond the present," what does the responsive environment's ever-changing "stability" represent — and does its immanence (its "immanent relationship to lived space") mark the end of architecture as cultural communication (Bouman) or a new form of it?
The closing Lefebvrian claim — that the dynamic interior "enables individuals and groups to sustain shared concepts of changes in meanings and values" — is asserted rather than argued. Do the chapter's corporate, efficiency-diagram non-places support this emancipatory reading, or does the responsive environment equally serve the "silent exchanges and injunctions" Fuller describes?
How does Taylor's dynamic interior relate to Qureshi's spatial therapy of "hybridized digital/analog space"? Both make technology the interior's fourth dimension; is real-time responsiveness the therapeutic interior's mechanism or its rival?

Notes

The working extract carries no page numbers; quotes are located by section heading. The chapter's endnotes identify the sources: Caan, Rethinking Design and Interiors (2011); Brooker & Stone, Rereadings (2004); Augé, Non-Places (1995); Graham & Marvin, Splintering Urbanism (2001); Bingaman, Treating the New Anxiety (2007); Fuller, "Life in Transit" (2003); Bouman, "Architecture, Liquid, Gas" (2005); Weinstock, "Terrain Vague" (2005); Burry in Ayres ed., Persistent Modelling (2012); Glanville, "An Intelligent Architecture" (2001); Croci, "Inhabiting the Body and the Spaces of Interaction" (2008); Oosterhuis ed., Interactive Architecture (2007); Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1991, p. 221); Filmer, "Songtime" (2003).
The source renders the dECOi principal's name "Mark Goulthorp" (elsewhere spelled Goulthorpe).