'An Indeterminate World' Reading

WHAT WE WANT AND WHAT WE NEED KEEPS CHANGING

Within this blog I will be quoting from An Indeterminate World and reflecting upon certain quotes.

"Indeterminacy to the built environment."

It is plausible that designing for the built environment in the future will be undetermined. Future society wants and needs of tomorrow cannot be predicted by designers of today.

"It revealed a world beyond architecture; a sublime world of pure servicing, information, networking, transience." 

When you break architecture down, it is purely just designed for the functions of human needs, such as their servicing, information collecting and networking needs.

"Archigram group imagined a 'scene machine' of its own: a continuous creative recomposition of architecture, a lived and playful process configured by the user." 

Predictions of future technologies include houses compiled of holographic screens. Everything in your home will be a connected screen. Even furniture will be connected as an individual screen. The user will be able to change their occupied architecture as they please. The only issue with replacing walls and roofs with holographic screens is that the user inside is not protected from the elements architecture prevent, including the safety of that individual. Nonetheless this is an outstanding concept for the future of Architecture. Homes where people can change their architecture as they please or as society changes.

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"An architecture that expressed its habitant's supposed desire for continuous change - can be much more related to the ambiguity of life."

"Buildings with no capacity to change can only become slums or ancient monuments."

An idea I had, to protect occupants from natural elements whilst living within a 'scene machine', was that entire homes/lots would be surrounded by a three-story high glass exterior (skin). Only occupants can see out whilst pedestrians cannot see within. The glass of this structure would also be photovoltaic for the collecting of solar energy. Within this controlled safe environment, the occupants can design their future home as they please and change it as they need. Streets would be full of reflecting, solar collecting, glass homes.

"The theoretical ambivalence of modernism, its tension between the spontaneous and the contained." 

"By the socially determined program." 

Society clearly defines how an Architect must design. Therefore to work out how future designs may exist, we must predict the future of society.

"The program was just another sort of idealism." 

Perhaps a socially determined program is non existent. Perhaps we live our lives as we please and architecture is already unique for the people who inhabit their own architecture.

"Life is negotiated, not reprogramming." 

Society can not be tamed, therefore designers must adapt to the terms given.

Modernism: modern and current values. This is what design all comes down to, when regarding indeterminate factors.

"In the 1920's, the white austerity of modern architecture promised economy in an age of scarcity." 

War and wealth are two other major influences on the change of architecture over time.

"Expendability offered the only realistic cue for the future of modern architecture, a departure from the 'doing the most with the least' crusade." 

"By 1970, Peter Cook felt that buildings and planning would benefit from an animal integration - connected and jointed like vertebrae, flesh, organs, skin and digestion."

Organic architecture. The concept of organic design has been argued upon for a long time now. The idea of natural, fluent connected parts designed to fit human needs. Becoming one with nature. 

The question is, would it work? "A city is not a tree." Is it possible to have a 'Living City'?

"Both inorganic and organic systems"

Is it possible that these systems of architecture can work together. If so, inorganic systems must be based upon organic systems if to incorporate the natural side of organic systems.

"Architecture, unlike a game of checkers with fixed rules and a fixed number of pieces, and much like a joke, determined by context, is the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland, where the Queen of Hearts (society, technology, economics) keeps changing the rules."

Truly an amazing metaphor. Design has many influences, of which most are indetermined, such as society, technology and economics.

"The defining challenge for Archigram became to break the unwieldy, static support to which architecture, from house to megastructure, was addicted."

Kits-of-parts: parts of a home which are able to be fitted together as one pleases (modular architecture).

eg.

Prefabricated parts much like lego, but including parts like services (toilets, laundry, kitchen), bedrooms, hallways, roofs and so on. Nonetheless this type of style only works in an engineering point of view, not architecturally. Architecture will forever exist.. or will it?

"A house will no longer be this solidly built thing which sets out to defy time and decay... it will become a tool as the motor car is becoming a tool."

The concept of movable architecture. The use stays the same, but the location changes. The idea even that a house can be one day a small item which opens out wherever the user desires it.

A holographic world dot-urbanprojection.com

"The vision of the helicopter with the dome dangling beneath it."

Relates well to the concept of establishing a skin so inside anything is possible (in terms of holographic screen homes). "it still summarises the whole point of minimal effort for maximum effect."

"It is easier to allow for individual felixibility than organisational change."

The concept of reorganizational units is another possibility to futuristic designs within an indeterminate future,

eg. Monsanto House, Disland (1954-1957)

Archigram also covers the fact that imitated consumer products are 'being killed by the markets'. Perhaps people do not want adaptable buildings. Maybe this is a result of the market. It is hard to implement a technology within one profession without it possibly affecting other professions.

All the influences on Architecture come down to the Triple Bottom Line: Society, Economics and Environment.

"Archigram thinks that architects should stop making bigger and better boxes and get down to the real business of architecture today which they think is survival."

Fullerine's theory of Survivalism. If living to survive, only the necessities are required. Designing for times of war is survivalist design. During war there was a great inventive leap due to the requirements of survival. Therefore if only designing and building minimal, that spare money can allow technology to advance at a higher rate. Nevertheless this is not what the current market wants or needs!

"It is not possible to live in almost any type or form of house one likes to name in any region of the world that takes the fancy."

Coming back to the futuristic skin theme:

"The skin which can be seen through, the skin which can be parent to all within, the skin which can be regularized, the skin which can be treated as an environmental totality."

This design can be seen as organic because it acts like a body does for organs.

My highest rated concept in the reading was the concept involving jets of air propelling people up off the ground, into non-existent beds for people to sleep in. An entire grid of powerful jets of air along the ground provides this new design method. Is it possible that in the future these jets can be controlled with our minds? Or what about a grid of poles which lift from magnet levitation. The user would be able to lift these 0.1m x 0.1m poles establishing walls and rooms. The user can change parts of their developed mind architecture as they please. The user can also start again or save a house setup for a new skin location. All simply created with the user's mind!

"If only we can get to an architecture that really responded to human wish as it occurred, then we would be get somewhere.."

Organic indeterminate design solution: A continuous realm of biological-electronic control systems, representing the principles of "flow and organicism".

To summarise the skin aspect: The set limitation would be the actual exterior skin, whilst the interior would have no limitations except for the imagination of the user.

"'Less is more' aestethic. We get caught up in an abstract delight in the 'nothingness' architecture that this suggests."
"It's funny how we're so advanced now that we live in boxes" - Horrorshow
As Archigram suggests, maybe humans will always be happy to live in simple, set forms. Perhaps humans do not like the opportunity of future architecture, or perhaps the market will sway the trend of architecture into future architectural trends?

"Human dwelling was being revolutionized by networks of traffic, aerodynamics, and telecommunications."

Architecture without borders/walls - minimalisthousedesign.com

"Architects of the future might not be concerned with enclosure at all or at least not built up enclosures. We could all be floating around in weatherproof space suits, taking "shots" for our feeding or any other physical or mental stimulus  that we might require. Somewhere though there would still have to be a horizontal plane, demarked with neon lights if you like, but in some way suggestive of a place where we could work out our feelings of community." 

From my own personal perspective, this is the future of architecture. No built enclosures. Holographic walls which can be walked through or walls which disappear as the user desires. However the aspect of floating around with no gravity seems extremely bizarre. Perhaps in a good hundred years, when space travel is more advanced, people will visit the moon and 'architecture' as such will exist.

"Place as found in nature, not prepackaged by design."

"By developing elaborate simulations of green fields, fresh breezes, and quaint people within the confines of the individual home."

"We must construct a living paradox which is able to recognize conflict without emotion."
The idea of architecture which deals with human emotions.

"The pill and the plastic liver have ended the concern that we are all part of some wonderful inevitable natural process."

Sadler, S., 2005. Beyond Architecture. In. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. pp90-138.