1. Beyond Materiality in Architecture
'When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more important than the rain, in fact the weather has probably more to do with the pulsation of the Living City at that given moment.' (Cook 1963) In the introduction to an issue of Living Arts magazine published in 1963, British architect Peter Cook claimed that architecture, at least as it was traditionally conceived, no longer played a significant role in shaping the urban experience. This issue of Living Arts was a catalog for "Living City," an exhibition organized by the young British architecture collective Archigram and presented at the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. At the time of the exhibition, "swinging" London epitomized the modernization of British cities in the 1950s and 1960s (Sadler 2005). The glare of neon lights, the proliferation of urban advertising, the glitter and glam of new (American) products displayed in storefront windows, or the horror of "garishly decorated restaurants" (Brooker 1969, 269)—this illuminated "pop" city became the curse of "proper" British architects and urban planners. This urban vernacular, "Living City" claimed, made fussing with the detailing of urban facades or interior lobbies irrelevant, as people on the street received them as fragments, at best, being more influenced by ambient, immaterial, and kinetic forces than by the detailed formal articulation of space and material.
[Archigram / "Gloop 4 Communications in Living City", Living Arts No. 2 / 1963]
[Warren Chalk / Living City Survival Kit / 1963 In the face of contemporary conditions, declaring a crisis in architecture as a means of arguing for its reinvention is a classic—indeed, a well-worn—tactic. Thirty years after "Living City," Rem Koolhaas introduced the concepts of Junkspace and the Generic City to describe the global, undifferentiated extension of built space, where the drive toward Bigness supersedes the attentive detailing of architectural and urban design. Declaring, "The city is no longer. We can leave the theatre now" (Koolhaas 1995), he echoes Archigram's assessment that the "old" tools, techniques, and obsessions of architecture are no longer relevant to current conditions. "People can inhabit anything," he claims. "And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it" (Heron 1996). Today, as the data clouds of the twenty-first century descend on the streets, sidewalks, and squares of contemporary cities, we might ask: to what extent are these Hertzian weather systems becoming "as important, possibly more important" than built form in shaping our experience of the city? On any given day, we pass through transportation systems using magnetic stripe or Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags to pay a fare; we coordinate meeting times and places through SMS text messaging on the run; we cluster in cafes and parks where WiFi is free; we move in and out of spaces blanketed by CCTV surveillance cameras; and we curse our wireless provider when its cell towers are not in reliable range of our place of residence. Hertzian space is all around us, coming in waves of various frequencies, lengths, and intervals, embedded in manifold ways within the course of our everyday lives. Given these conditions, how might we begin to think about how to shape these environments? To what extent can we see this as a way of practicing a new kind of urban architecture? Recent work on urban computing and locative media has begun to examine the larger urban implications of the proliferation of mobile, embedded, wireless, and pervasive computing technologies throughout the material fabric of everyday life (Crang and Graham 2007; Dave 2007; Ellison et al. 2007; Galloway 2004; Greenfield 2006; Shepard and Greenfield 2007; Kindberg et al. 2007; Shklovski and Chang 2006). Yet, surprisingly, little work has been done to place these technological developments within the larger context of urban architecture and the spatial complexities architecture has historically addressed. This may be due, in part, to the profession’s historic intransigence vis-à-vis the immaterial. It is important to recall that "Living City" was received by the public at large as a radical statement from young upstarts operating at the periphery of the architectural establishment. It would be many years before Archigram would build anything at all, preferring the speed and expedience of publishing architectural zines over the patient practice involved in making buildings. In the passages that follow, I attempt to cast issues of urban computing, locative media and ambient informatics in terms of a broader and long-standing discourse on architecture and urban space. My intent is not to lay professional or disciplinary claim to this still relatively uncharted territory. Rather, I am interested in examining how this dialogue between technology, sociality and urban space not only offers a new opportunity to bring architecture beyond itself but also opens new avenues for critical exploration in the evolving and related fields of urban computing, locative media and ambient informatics. |
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