new material anatomies
maya przybylksi – j cameron parkin
François Dallegret’s accompanying illustrations to Rayner Banham’s 1965 essay ‘A Home is not a House’ 1 depict a mechanical invasion by bringing complexes of ducts, wiring, HVAC units, plumbing and conduits into our material perception of architecture. In particular, Dallegret’s Anatomy of a Dwelling , facing page, isolates the material presence of the mechanical systems proliferating in domestic architecture and imagines a scenario where these systems eventually supplant entirely all other domestic architectural elements. While the pairing of text and illustrations work in service of Banham’s fight against gratuitous architectural monuments, it’s Dallegret’s presentation of new material anatomies to which we respond here. By removing the surficial, most familiar architectural elements of a dwelling – the walls, floors, windows and doors – and exposing the back-of-house, these anatomical drawings expose and shed light on new elements, namely the often ignored and concealed mechanical elements that architects can and should engage. Learning from Dallegret’s techniques, we present an updated anatomical account of built work which doesn’t focus on the mechanical invasion of the 1960s but instead materialises the digital invasion of present day – where through the continued growth in responsive (or sentient, adaptive, interactive, … or even smart) architecture, there is a proliferation of software-embedded design (SED), where hardware and software work together with physical assemblies to mediate the physical environment. These projects can take on many forms ranging from corporate- driven, top-down initiatives focused on the optimisation of municipal services and business-oriented activities, to bottom- up citizen-oriented projects aimed at empowering individuals in creating new inclusive ways to organise, use and shape the places they live. Projects like these are manifested in a variety of formats including immersive experiences, participatory platforms and responsive architectures.
One such project, Murmur Wall by FUTUREFORMS, visualises data streams, harvested from online activity, moving through a weave of steel and acrylic tubing in pursuit of an ‘artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking and feeling’. 2 Murmur Wall was first installed in the gardens at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2015. In such practice, architects are increasingly bundling digital components, such as code, algorithms and data, together with physical assemblies, thereby adding complexity to how projects operate in the real-world. Projects are now complex entanglements where physical and digital elements work together to control, actuate and animate built form. While Dallegret needed only to peel away material layers to uncover the physically present mechanical systems, exposing the anatomy of SED projects calls for engagements with elements such as data and code, typically perceived as immaterial, lacking a physical dimension – a form of ephemera that lives in clouds and moves around the world through carefully choreographed pulses of light. We are working to resist the immaterial readings of these digital components. For us, the code/data bundles driving SED work are not decoupled from a project’s physical dimension and instead should be thought of as soft materials, materials in and of themselves, and thus constituting part of a project’s material assembly. This reconceptualisation brings these custom computational elements back into the domain of the designer; explicitly managing their effects becomes part of the design solution. Motivating this reconceptualisation are key offerings from the field of Software Studies which position software, its actual lines of code, not just its effects – as a material practice with both social and spatial outcomes. 3
Software Studies recognises the design and implementation of both software and built environments, and the people that populate them, as constituting, mediating and shaping forces of everyday life. Emphasis on the social implications of code implementation has recently come to the fore in discussions around the embedded biases in artificial intelligence systems where the computational processes encoded are being shown to reflect the concerns, preferences and prejudices of those designing and implementing the systems. As a result, these implicit biases have the potential to ripple out, affecting everything from hiring decisions to road maintenance schedules. MIT’s Algorithmic Justice League is one outfit working to expose this coded gaze and counteract its impacts. 4 Looking at SED through a soft material lens, new obligations emerge for designers: SED work transforms computational components from studio instruments (often used in design development phases to refine geometry and optimise fabrication) with limited impact once the project leaves the studio, into persistent and active agents charged with continuous mediation of a project’s functioning in time and space. As producers of the material assemblages that constitute their design work, these designers need to be literate and to possess agency with respect to the social, cultural and political effects across the entire assembly – and this includes not only the physical material outside the computer but the digital material inside the machine and the connection between the two. We are exploring new ways to examine SED projects through analytical and representational techniques that recognise a project’s internal material assembly as an interrelated hybrid construction of both hard and soft materials. Our anatomical analysis of FUTUREFORMS’s Murmur Wall is presented on the next spread, pages 14-15.
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on site review 36: our material future
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