CTroyMathis
01 May 2003, 09:17 PM
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<td align=center valign=center bgcolor="#1d1d1d"><smallfont><font color="#ffffff"><b>Interactive Architecture: Buildings That Change Shape</b></smallfont></td>
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Shape-shifting architecture
Interactive buildings programmed to respond to the emotions of their inhabitants are cause for excitement and caution, MICHAEL POSNER writes
MICHAEL POSNER
Saturday, March 29, 2003
TORONTO -- Imagine an office building that could change its shape. This week it looks like an ocean liner, next week it morphs into a mushroom, the next it becomes a UFO. Outlandish? For sure. Impossible? Not at all, says Michael Bittermann. Not only are such visions possible, says the brilliant 26-year-old German architect, they're inevitable.
Bittermann was one of the featured speakers this week at Digifest 2003, a four-day conference on electronic cities that winds up today in Toronto, hosted and curated by the Design Exchange.
Major metropolitan centres are only beginning to adapt to the broader technological revolution of the last two decades. But the outcome of that adaptation -- what the cities of the future will look like -- is far from clear. On the one hand, we have ever-bolder utopian promises -- safe, efficient, integrated environments brought to you by the magic of digital technology. On the other, we have darker dystopian possibilities -- populations that (much like present-day Londoners) will be under constant video surveillance: technology harnessed not to liberate but to control.
Holding court for an hour, Bittermann explained that he is not interested in buildings as we traditionally think of them -- as static containers of homes, offices, stores and factories. What he's interested in is interactive architecture -- structures that, in some ways, are as alive as the people who inhabit them and that respond in real time to the emotive states of their users.
Bittermann, teaching even before he earns his master's degree from Technische Universiteit in Delft, the Netherlands, is associated with the Hyperbody Research Group headed by Dutch architect Kas Oosterhuis. The group regards buildings as living entities, with skin (the façade), organs (heating, air-conditioning, plumbing, electricity, etc.) and even blood of a kind (the digitized information that flows through the system).
A hyperbody is simply the logical extension of that model -- a programmable building that is capable of almost infinite redesign. And, since any building is essentially a strand of urban DNA, the city itself -- Bittermann argues -- is capable of becoming intelligent, responding to the shifting moods, habits, thoughts and feelings of its citizens. Just as there are T-shirts that can read body temperatures and change colour accordingly, so an array of sophisticated sensors could measure public opinion -- Is the street safe? Is it cool? The city would respond accordingly. "I'm quite convinced the whole development is going in this direction," says Bittermann.
It's an architectural demonstration of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which posits that nothing can be observed without affecting that which is observed.
Of course, Bittermann allows, something like this already occurs -- even without benefit of gigabytes and motion detectors. A neighbourhood that becomes crime-ridden is likely to lose residents and shopkeepers. Rents fall and buildings deteriorate until, eventually, property values drop so low that the area again becomes attractive to speculators and developers.
But Oosterhuis's so-called e-motive architecture would accelerate this process, where both shape and content -- form and function -- yield elastically to external inputs.
Bittermann was part of the Oosterhuis team that submitted preliminary designs for the recent World Trade Center competition, won by Polish architect Daniel Libeskind. Their proposal envisaged a building that, using programmable hydraulic technology, changed its exterior shape every month -- transforming itself into a replica of the former WTC towers every September 11.
A slightly different approach to this model was offered to Digifest by Greg van Alstyne, an affiliate of Toronto's innovative Bruce Mau Design. Mau clearly understands the enormous potential conferred by technology. If the wired megalopolis is not quite here, it is clearly coming down the track and impossible to ignore. Fourteen years ago, television helped bring down the Soviet Union. More recently, it was wireless text messaging that enabled Filipinos to stage massive protests that ended the short unhappy political career of their president, Joseph Estrada.
But Mau seems less willing to cede teleological control to the machines. As van Alstyne put it: "Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"
Whereas the Oosterhuis school explicitly thinks it's time to bring down the curtain on the Renaissance-bred paradigm of man as the privileged centre of the universe. "That's a form of arrogance," says Bittermann, "to think we're the centrepiece and generator of all things. We're not so special, and not the only superintelligences around."
It was left to British design consultant David Griffiths to raise a necessary, cautionary flag. "I think you have to beware of the law of unintended consquences," he said. Londoners, he noted, have so far reacted with equanimity to the new traffic decongestion scheme set up last month.
The plan, implemented by a network of 700 video cameras, charges drivers the equivalent of $11 a day for the right to bring cars into the city's central core.
But with only modest software changes, the system could be easily reconfigured to take pictures of people -- on the pretext of counter-terrorism. Already, he says, experts are predicting a migration of crime to the suburbs -- until their governing councils, too, install comparable technology.
In a similarly Orwellian vein, there is so-called smart labelling, which deploys a microchip connected to an antenna. Dispensing with universal bar codes that require tedious individual scanning, smart labelling would allow a store clerk to scan an entire truckload of soda pop (or anything else) within seconds, without unloading.
But, Griffiths observed, it might also allow a market researcher to drive up and down residential streets remotely recording everything you've purchased. To prevent such abuses, legal and judicial safeguards will be be needed.
Of course, McLuhan warned us. Technology isn't neutral; it has inertia, its own imperative. So the outline, at least, of the coming struggle seems clear.
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<td align=center valign=center bgcolor="#1d1d1d"><smallfont><font color="#ffffff"><b>Interactive Architecture: Buildings That Change Shape</b></smallfont></td>
<tr><td align=center valign=top bgcolor="#ffffff"><font color="#1d1d1d">
Shape-shifting architecture
Interactive buildings programmed to respond to the emotions of their inhabitants are cause for excitement and caution, MICHAEL POSNER writes
MICHAEL POSNER
Saturday, March 29, 2003
TORONTO -- Imagine an office building that could change its shape. This week it looks like an ocean liner, next week it morphs into a mushroom, the next it becomes a UFO. Outlandish? For sure. Impossible? Not at all, says Michael Bittermann. Not only are such visions possible, says the brilliant 26-year-old German architect, they're inevitable.
Bittermann was one of the featured speakers this week at Digifest 2003, a four-day conference on electronic cities that winds up today in Toronto, hosted and curated by the Design Exchange.
Major metropolitan centres are only beginning to adapt to the broader technological revolution of the last two decades. But the outcome of that adaptation -- what the cities of the future will look like -- is far from clear. On the one hand, we have ever-bolder utopian promises -- safe, efficient, integrated environments brought to you by the magic of digital technology. On the other, we have darker dystopian possibilities -- populations that (much like present-day Londoners) will be under constant video surveillance: technology harnessed not to liberate but to control.
Holding court for an hour, Bittermann explained that he is not interested in buildings as we traditionally think of them -- as static containers of homes, offices, stores and factories. What he's interested in is interactive architecture -- structures that, in some ways, are as alive as the people who inhabit them and that respond in real time to the emotive states of their users.
Bittermann, teaching even before he earns his master's degree from Technische Universiteit in Delft, the Netherlands, is associated with the Hyperbody Research Group headed by Dutch architect Kas Oosterhuis. The group regards buildings as living entities, with skin (the façade), organs (heating, air-conditioning, plumbing, electricity, etc.) and even blood of a kind (the digitized information that flows through the system).
A hyperbody is simply the logical extension of that model -- a programmable building that is capable of almost infinite redesign. And, since any building is essentially a strand of urban DNA, the city itself -- Bittermann argues -- is capable of becoming intelligent, responding to the shifting moods, habits, thoughts and feelings of its citizens. Just as there are T-shirts that can read body temperatures and change colour accordingly, so an array of sophisticated sensors could measure public opinion -- Is the street safe? Is it cool? The city would respond accordingly. "I'm quite convinced the whole development is going in this direction," says Bittermann.
It's an architectural demonstration of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which posits that nothing can be observed without affecting that which is observed.
Of course, Bittermann allows, something like this already occurs -- even without benefit of gigabytes and motion detectors. A neighbourhood that becomes crime-ridden is likely to lose residents and shopkeepers. Rents fall and buildings deteriorate until, eventually, property values drop so low that the area again becomes attractive to speculators and developers.
But Oosterhuis's so-called e-motive architecture would accelerate this process, where both shape and content -- form and function -- yield elastically to external inputs.
Bittermann was part of the Oosterhuis team that submitted preliminary designs for the recent World Trade Center competition, won by Polish architect Daniel Libeskind. Their proposal envisaged a building that, using programmable hydraulic technology, changed its exterior shape every month -- transforming itself into a replica of the former WTC towers every September 11.
A slightly different approach to this model was offered to Digifest by Greg van Alstyne, an affiliate of Toronto's innovative Bruce Mau Design. Mau clearly understands the enormous potential conferred by technology. If the wired megalopolis is not quite here, it is clearly coming down the track and impossible to ignore. Fourteen years ago, television helped bring down the Soviet Union. More recently, it was wireless text messaging that enabled Filipinos to stage massive protests that ended the short unhappy political career of their president, Joseph Estrada.
But Mau seems less willing to cede teleological control to the machines. As van Alstyne put it: "Now that we can do anything, what will we do?"
Whereas the Oosterhuis school explicitly thinks it's time to bring down the curtain on the Renaissance-bred paradigm of man as the privileged centre of the universe. "That's a form of arrogance," says Bittermann, "to think we're the centrepiece and generator of all things. We're not so special, and not the only superintelligences around."
It was left to British design consultant David Griffiths to raise a necessary, cautionary flag. "I think you have to beware of the law of unintended consquences," he said. Londoners, he noted, have so far reacted with equanimity to the new traffic decongestion scheme set up last month.
The plan, implemented by a network of 700 video cameras, charges drivers the equivalent of $11 a day for the right to bring cars into the city's central core.
But with only modest software changes, the system could be easily reconfigured to take pictures of people -- on the pretext of counter-terrorism. Already, he says, experts are predicting a migration of crime to the suburbs -- until their governing councils, too, install comparable technology.
In a similarly Orwellian vein, there is so-called smart labelling, which deploys a microchip connected to an antenna. Dispensing with universal bar codes that require tedious individual scanning, smart labelling would allow a store clerk to scan an entire truckload of soda pop (or anything else) within seconds, without unloading.
But, Griffiths observed, it might also allow a market researcher to drive up and down residential streets remotely recording everything you've purchased. To prevent such abuses, legal and judicial safeguards will be be needed.
Of course, McLuhan warned us. Technology isn't neutral; it has inertia, its own imperative. So the outline, at least, of the coming struggle seems clear.
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