William Mitchell...Recombinant Architecture...Doors 2
< < < Previous Page | Speakers | Conference Report | Doors 2 | Mediamatic Index
-
This
is a very famous one that had tremendous impact on the way designers thought
about interaction with machines. This is Ivan Sutherland in 1963, working on a
system called sketch pad, which introduced many of the fundamental ideas
of interaction still with us today.
-
By
1967, we start to see the appearance of head tracking devices coupled with
stereo displays and the first explorations of the idea of immersive virtual
reality.
1969 was another landmark that I remember vividly: ground zero point for development of the ArpaNet, which later grew into the Internet. Very unobtrusively, at UCLA on the west side of Los Angeles, just a little bit more than twenty five years ago, the ArpaNet went into action. It started to pump out bits. I was a young assistant professor at UCLA and I remember that we gave the people who installed that first mode a lot of grief about the idea of a one-mode network. But, pretty soon, there were two and three modes.
Interestingly enough, the ArpaNet began as an instrument of the military. As I recall, it was an instrument of social purpose right from the start. What mainly went on in those very early days was exchange of E mail for social purposes: greetings with friends, making dates remotely and so on.
-
By
the early 1990's, we had begun to see the emergence of commercial products that
gave a combination of relatively inexpensive computation and audio/video
transmission. So here's a typical example of a work station, but that box
doubles as television set if it's set up differently. What we see here on the
screen is finally a low-cost, easily proliferated realization of the kind of
thing the Victorians imagined. We see distant people on the screen, as well as
an open computer-aided design window. People are discussing a project over the
Net, the Internet, in this case. And there is a video camera on top of the work
station screen. A configuration very much like that slide I showed you. We are
looking at remote interaction combined with computation.
The other thing that emerged in the early 1990s was effective cyberspace navigation tools. The World Wide Web had been around for a while and was a bit stodgy, frankly. It finally met Mosaic, which was really cute. It was a beautiful client-server romance and the rest is history. This created the capacity to move quickly to just the bits that you wanted, wherever they were on the Net. Over the last couple of years , we've seen an extraordinary proliferation of the use of this kind of technology to get around in the Web. So, from my point of view, we seem to be moving rapidly towards a worldwide information infrastructure that combines four things:
Firstly, the bandwidth and multi-media capability we associate with cable television--good video and audio.
Secondly, the switching capability we associate with the telephone system. You can rapidly switch and directly get from any point to any other in the Net.
The third part of the equation is the local storage and computing capability that we have come to associate with the personal computer.
The fourth part of the picture is the navigation capability demonstrated fairly recently by the World Wide Web and Mosaic combination. And it is being demonstrated in other ways by agent systems and so on. I think we can hope and fight for some additional characteristics that I believe are politically important and which certainly will not emerge automatically. Indeed, we'll be told that some or all of these things are too expensive and difficult. But let me enumerate some of the characteristics that do seem important to me. Other people have mentioned these.
Firstly, the importance of two-way symmetrical digital pipes in the plumbing of the information infrastructure. Otherwise, interactions are highly unbalanced and unsymmetrical. That seems to me a fundamentally undesirable political condition.
Secondly, something that has been said many times but bears repeating: some form of universal access to cyberspace. That is very difficult and begs the question of the details of precisely what that means. But it's something that becomes increasingly important as more and more services and economic opportunities are delivered digitally.
Thirdly, something that may be a little less obvious: the right of anybody to put a server on the Net and become a producer as well as a consumer of information.
So this is the kind of environment one sees emerging. And the interesting question from an architect's point of view is: what does this mean for the kinds of living spaces that we have? The kinds of domestic spaces we'll inhabit? The ways these domestic spaces and other kinds of spaces will come together to make community?
N e w L i v i n g S p a c e s
When I say community, I mean it in a broad sense: a physically definable or a virtual community. Or some combination and overlay of these things.
I think the fundamental implication from an architect's and an urban designer's point of view of the development of this sort of infrastructure is that digital information transmitted in large quantities through computer networks becomes a solvent that decomposes traditional architecture and urban patterns and allows the remaining fragments to recombine into new patterns.
It does this by breaking down the adjacency imperatives that traditionally have held the parts of the building together. Examples of this are plentiful. Let's take the very familar example of a main street bank. Look what's happened over the last couple of decades with the emergence of the automatic teller machine.
A bank building used to be a neoclassical edifice on the main street of a community. It not only accomodated all of the functions of the bank; it represented the power and prestige of that institution in the community. It was where you went when you wanted to conduct some transactions that involved money in significant quantities. Going to the bank was certainly a significant event in daily life.
Look at what's happened to banks now. The automatic teller machine came along and probably will go away as cash becomes even more dematerialized. But the condition that we had for some time was that the functions were accommodated in the bank building. And now they are being increasingly taken over by the network of automated teller machines and international money transfer software.
So that old architectual unity of the bank disappears. And then the fragments, the automated teller machines, end up in a lot of different locations. They end up combining with other building types where people need cash. You find them in supermarkets, student unions and transportation terminals. In South Central Los Angeles, you find them in police station lobbies because that's the safe place to pick up cash.
So a kind of recombination is taking place. I agree, it's not something to be commended, but that's the reality of the situation that has emerged.
You can go through building type after building type and see the beginnings and sometimes an advanced stage of this kind of decomposition and recombination.
I'm going to take you through a particular example of something we've been dealing with at MIT recently: the idea of a virtual design studio.
Speakers |
Conference Report |
Doors 2 |
Mediamatic Index |
Next Page > > >