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Hybrid living
This is not about domotics, this is not only about technology; as stated before: where it concerns our direct environment - whether we call that home or not - I am not immediately interested in technology for the sake of technology. I am interested in what is in between; to put it in simple terms: this paradoxical situation between a protective 'house' and the link with the outside world. It's like Aldous Huxley once said: "Technological progress offers us more efficient ways to turn back the clock". Read more 'Basics' / Lees verder 'Basics' ...
On these pages texts, links, articles, developments etc. will be gathered and hopefully discussed.
Novak 24-08-2011
In 1996 Marcos Novak wrote 'Transmitting Architecture', an article still valuable and actual today. Last February he was interviewed by Per-Johan Dahl in Los Angeles; again intriguing and interesting.
house or home 06-03-2011
For: the Creativist Society, March 2011
House and/or home.
If there is one issue that keeps coming back in discussions among (interior)architects it is that on housing, home, privacy, etc.
If there is one choice in which this is relevant it is the one on the Creativist website: 'we can be a creativist or we can be a consumer.'
Since this is a choice not completely free of understandable simplification; let me add some ever current complexity but also try to shed some light in this; especially because this discussion will become more important in the rest of his decade, due to some developments.
It was Gaston Bachelard who said: ' the house we were born in is more than the embodiment of home, it is also the embodiment of dreams.'
This was - and still is - the perfect illustration of the difference between 'house' and 'home': the first being a building, a structure: something physical. The latter being something abstract, untouchable; but nevertheless the most important condition to make us feel 'at home' .
Being at home is not about technology, not about bricks and tiles: home is about memories, images, smells, sounds, etc. (The actual question now is: do we need a house to have a home? But I will leave that item for another moment)
If we buy or rent a house nowadays we have hardly any choice in this: the housing-market in the Netherlands is largely supply-driven, not demand-driven. Hence the always returning discussion on the variety and amount of houses build; the impossibility to adapt houses to individual (changing) demands, based on changing private circumstances: family-expansion, working at home, hobbies, etc.
Usually the plans of current housing do not allow the realisation of simple changes: we build as if we build for centuries to come, in which demands will not change, as if a society will remain as it has been for years and technology is still something out of the 20th. century. Technology however so far is applied to the building, not to the - personal -environment created by that and attached to that.
Soon there may appear 2 ways to make a paradigm-shift; and therefore become more of a creativist:
1. the increasing demand for a way of building in which the inhabitant is the first important. We do not build anymore for people we do not know: we supply possibilities to create environments where each individual can determine his/her 'sphere'. That means a significant simplification of the current 'building'-practise and more importance for other professions.
2. the development of the Internet of Things: in about 5-8 years we will witness the increasing possibilities to identify, recognise and influence our environment and therefore adapt it to our personal needs. Next to that the increasing development and supply of smart materials: materials that react on presence, touch, temperature, sound, light.
Our environment, whether we call this 'home' or else, is/should be something that we will be able to determine and shape according to our wishes and needs, with a personal attached privacy-level to fit with it. This should enable us to create spheres, circumstances, to (re)create our experiences, (re)live our imagination.
We all want to add meaning to our (way of) life, and therefore our homes. Basically home has little to do with technology; but technological developments can facilitate the addition and articulation of this meaning.
Then we can, according to Heidegger, feel 'at home' , simply because we can 'build'.
building & iot 10-01-2011
What does living together mean;
part 2, Empty Spaces?
In desperate search for some data yesterday I stumbled upon a working document by Council's Rob v.Kranenburg dated April 2009 for a proposed conference on Hybrid Living. That same morning a Dutch real-estate company announced that in the Netherlands 6,5 million m2. office-space is empty; which is 14% of the total amount.
Rob referred to the Walter Gropius Manifesto of 1919: "let us together desire, conceive and create the new building of the future, which will combine everything - architecture and sculpture and painting - in a single form".
Some 50 years later it was the Dutch artist Constant who created New Babylon; a chain of 'cities', raised from ground-level, based on the premise that man did not have to work anymore and could spend his/her life according to Huizinga's Homo Ludens creative principles. A structure, spread out across the country, where each individual could create his/her own environment. The social and economic conditions for this project were - at that time - never realised.
Let's make a creative jump of uncertain distance but with considerable imaginative power.
Now, again 50 years later, we might have the fundamentals for a revival of the principles of both Gropius and Constant. What if we could embed the 'structure' of the Internet of Things - our interface - together with all imagination and technology possible, to create one's own environment in the existing structures now empty.
We would thus create adaptive information spaces in, what David Brin calls, a Transparant Society.
We might even be able to connect these various structures over the country, thus re-creating Constant's vision as a basis for what Gropius meant in his days and what is nowadays imaginable and possible and perhaps even necessary.
After all, an amount of space like this can be made 'connectable' somehow, somewhere, sometimes.
Martin Pot
Jan. 5th, 2011
photograph: courtesy the Hague Municipal Museum
internet of things 29-12-2010
It was, I believe, the French psycho-analyst Jacques Lacan who stated that the reality in which man lives mainly consist of images, desires, etc. , not the average social daily life. Our build environment is only for a small - but important - part a precondition for this; where it concerns our experiences we have an increasing amount of possibilities available to determine, realise and influence our environment, be it build or virtual.
So far our experiences in the virtual world take place within the build environment; we need some kind of 'sphere', to use the word of Peter Sloterdijk, to ensure our protection from the elements, to provide some kind of safety and, so far, a certain level of privacy.
This difference between environments is still quite explicit: we build first and after that we inhabit, we do not dwell and settle. We build first, then we determine how and where we decide to go 'out': physically, virtually, spiritually. Given the possibilities of the IOT this could change: if we can create an environment which does not mainly consist of 'something concrete' , but of something with more or less the same pre-conditions, we might be able to focus much more on Lacan' s view's.
After all; our 'homes' are only for a small part a physical environment; especially the home in which we were born is no tabula rasa, our home consist of memories, images, experiences, smells, sounds, etc.
We have increasing possibilities to create and influence those elements; with the IOT even more, in addition with contacts, information: we realise 'homes' which contain huge amounts of data.
Maybe we end up with a situation where the build home-environment is no different from the public environment: the only difference will be the kind and level of privacy, as well as the profile that accompanies us.
Living together is at that stage not determined by the current hard boundaries between the public and private sphere; we will be able to provide ourselves with the sphere needed: the images available, the sounds and smells wished, the information necessary. Not only because it is possible, but because it is what our memory, reality and environment already contains.
Martin Pot
28-12-2010
interactive landscapes 29-09-2010
On the 27th. of October NAI-Publishers present the first book of architect/artist Daan Roosegaarde: 'Interactive Landscapes'. His works are 'a dynamic fusion of architecture, people and e3-culture.'; this connection between design and content, between ideology and technology is what Roosegaarde calls techno-poetry.
His works were shown at Tate Modern, Victoria & Albert and National Museum Tokio.
Recent works: Dune and Lotus 7.0.
huts 23-09-2010
on the recent exposition Architect@Work, 15-16 Sept. in Rotterdam the Koln International School of Design showed a project on HUTS:
From the catalogus:
"Huts provide an escape from the banality of everyday life, and habitual surroundings. (..) Freed from technical requirements that usually dictate the design and function of architecture, this project focuses on the needs that drive people to spend their spare time in small shelters miles away from urban space, and explores the fine balace point between the extremes of retreat and adventure."
smart environments 23-09-2010
see very relevant article by Vadim Chekletsov : Geo Sapiens; extended body as enlived environment.
mullican 14-09-2010
in Museum Kroller-Muller the American artist Matt Mullican showed his works; a blueprint for a 'better' world, presented as a thinking-model, a city of the brains, as the leaflet says.
see the complete text.
kitchen 13-09-2010
IKEA´s kitchen of the future: the Swedish company received a report by the Future Laboratory on what this kitchen would look like. from the press-release: "in thirty years time, the kitchen will be so technologically advanced that it will almost be alive, responding actively to our needs like only a mther could."
I remember various studies and projects over time: Allison & Peter Smithson´s House of the Future, the Dutch House of the Future, etc.: all were never realised for the major part. Especially when it concerns a basic function like preparing and cooking our daily food I believe in handling that food, thinking on what you want to eat, how you want to prepare, how you want to serve breakfast and dinner. Of course; some tasks and functions can/will be automated; but reading of a kitchen that suggest a bloody mary when I have a hangover is far beyond my acceptance.
basics 10-09-2010
What do I mean when I write - and think - about hybrid living; is there any other kind; can living or dwelling be anything else than a mixture of location, experiences, images and information?
One of the first texts I remember that handled the subject of dwelling in this context was an article by Eric Bolle in Archis 6-89: "Dwelling, a disputed philosophy" (orig.in dutch, transl.mp) where he discussed architect Peter Eisenman.
Eisenman more or less rejected traditional dwelling because of the reference, the memories it contains, the inability to build a home where our existence in that home is largely based on images. The House VI he build for the Frank' s in Connecticut in 1975 is a good example (perfectly described in process and result by Mrs. Suzanne Frank). It's however not - only - about architecture; Eric Bolle considers dwelling man's being, the way man is; with all uncertainty, fear, sensibility for all that is part of being in this one place.
That same year philosopher wrote an article for the Basler Zeitung: "Einiger über dach- und mauerlose Häuser mit verschiedenen Kabelanschlüssen", published again in 2007 in "Von der Freiheit des Migranten" (EVA Taschenbuch) with the title "Häuser Bauen" , which indicates once more the actuality.
In 1997 Dorien Pessers writes, again in Archis (1997-8) : "What will happen with man and his inner state when the symbolism of containment is lost in a house that has become transparent?"
Now we face relevant developments in technology and privacy, in building, in media.
So many years after his text and many others we can only admit that this is still - and increasing - an actual discussion: with all developments concerning media, privacy, technology etc. , with our need to create an environment where we can feel 'at home' this is all the more an actual problem which deserves our attention.
This is not about domotics, this is not only about technology; as stated before: where it concerns our direct environment - whether we call that home or not - I am not immediately interested in technology for the sake of technology. I am interested in what is in between; to put it in simple terms: this paradoxical situation between a protective 'house' and the link with the outside world.
It's like Aldous Huxley once said: "Technological progress offers us more efficient ways to turn back the clock"
On these pages texts, links, articles, developments etc. will be gathered and hopefully discussed.
guiding doc 10-08-2010
last April 9th., 2010, we have had a Council-meeting on Home-Sense; the follow-up on the first meeting in Brussels. As preparation and general introduction I wrote the following text.
We can consider our immediate surroundings, sometimes called interior, our most important space. There we exist, in and from there we act, from there we communicate, in there we can and should feel free.
The proposed Internet of Things, as described in the EC-doc. dated September 2008, will have a significant influence on this environment, be it the private sphere or the more public.
If we consider the private sphere to be an important one, given the fact that man needs, besides Maslow's first precondition, some privacy somewhere to ensure being able to act as a social entity, this still leaves the question on how to define, create and guard such an environment.
Nowadays we see many people withdraw in their homes, simply because of the basic need to feel protected, unwatched, free and 'at home' . As Peter Sloterdijk once said: 'home is there to create habitation and triviality' .
On the other hand home - in the classical sense - is no ' tabula rasa' : it contains history and memories, images, feelings. We keep remembering our former homes, especially the one(s) in which we grew up.
Based on technological progress we are able - and will be much more soon - to determine and shape our environment to our needs; which raises the question how to define our 'homes'.
Some of the questions during the MIT-conference last December in Venice were:
• 'will our phone be enough to feel at home?
• 'can we live our lives in a distributed domestic space augmented with digital technology?'
All of this, I believe, requires two important guiding principles: trust and personalisation.
Trust in the fact that we can have a lasting influence on the (technological) possibilities to determine and guard our environment, be it our home or any other environment we regard a such; on a certain moment, in a certain space and place. Maybe here the classical term 'genius loci' will - if ever absent - return as paradigm, to act as guidance to determine the shape and amount of privacy we need.
So there we are: a world which, according to some, becomes more and more a world of surveillance, lack of privacy, increasing problems regarding basic human needs, social upheaval. If this implicates a withdrawal to the private sphere within our walls we might end up with the opposite of what we aim at: a world of mutual understanding and respect, openness to each other, freedom and social interaction, all based on trust.
Our build environment is one of the main prerequisites to ensure that the possibilities for creating a personalised environment are present. At the end 60'ties the Dutch artist and visionary Constant created New Babylon : based on the - afterwards to optimistic assumption - that man as a homo ludens did not have to work anymore and could feel free to be a creative nomad, living in huge superstructures above ground-level, taking up and shaping the space needed; to travel elsewhere when necessary and start all over again.
The social circumstances and settings required never became reality; the basic idea is still regarded as valuable and - part of it - timeless.
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