William Mitchell...Recombinant Architecture...Doors 2
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V i r t u a l D e s i g n S t u d i o
All architects and designers know that a design studio is a place where people come together in a well-lit environment to work on projects. This is a photograph of the design studio at MIT in the 19th century. You can see the architects at work. There are horizontal working surfaces where you can make drawings. There are places for physical models. The main thing going on in this bounded, coherent architectural space is discussion of the projects being designed. Design is largely a process of discussion, negotiation of ideas over the representations of what's being proposed.
This is the traditional kind of physical setting for that. But one can do this in a digital environment. We recently performed a very interesting experiment doing exactly this.
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Here,
represented by a simple screen image, is the kind of digital environment that
will enable you to make a virtual design studio. This is a very simple way of
doing it. What we have here is a Computer Aided Design window that gives access
to the digital model of whatever it is that's being designed. This can be
simple or complex access. The best thing is sophisticated application sharing
on the software that maintains this model, but you can get away with some
simpler things, too. And here we see the video windows giving access to remote
participants in the discussion.
About a few months ago, we ran a design studio project that involved six universities scattered around the world. The Universities were: MIT, Washington University in St. Louis, Cornell University, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, the University of Hong Kong and the Technical University of Barcelona. So the participants were scattered around the world, across time zones and cultures--in North America, in Asia and in Europe.
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This
group of about fifty or sixty scattered participants, students and faculty
members of different universities worked on a housing project for an area of
Shanghai. That's an area of traditional courtyard housing. This is a
computer-generated image of the massing of this housing and here's an oblique
view of the traditional type of housing known as Leilong housing. It's a very
beautiful type of housing fabric, but one that has certain problems in
accomodating modern uses and is often in very poor condition.
In this project, site information and programmatic information was collected by the students in Hong Kong and mounted on a server in Hong Kong, where it was available to the students of all the other locations. Students at the different locations then used the computer-aided design systems available to them to develop design proposals. They also collaborated very intensively, exchanging the work that they produced by video conferencing through the Internet and by e-mail.
The interesting thing about this is that it worked very well. If you've ever tried this, you know doing video through the Internet is really terrible. It's really bad video: small, fuzzy, low-frame-rate images. But when setting up an environment with which you could discuss something that was on the virtual conference table before you, even this very poor telepresence did the job. It gave good insight into what would happen if you had a bit more bandwidth and some more powerful pumps to pump the bits through the pipes a little bit faster. So the students negotiated back and forth and all sorts of interesting things happened. Students collaborated with each other and criticized each other. It was a very interesting cross-cultural interaction.
The viewpoints of the students from Barcelona were very different from those of the students from Hong Kong or MIT. This created an extraordinarily rich discourse. Some interesting collaborative arrangements developed. Being very competitive, the MIT students and the Hong Kong students rapidly discovered that there was a twelve-hour time difference between the two locations. So the MIT students would work for twelve hours and then shoot the files across to Hong Kong. Then the Hong Kong students would work for twelve hours and send them back. In this way, they got a twenty-four-hour operation going across the time zones that allowed them to do twice as much work as anyone else. This also produced a long distance dating facility of some effectiveness. Okay between MIT and Cornell. Not so good between MIT and Hong Kong.
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Anyway,
the thing developed very effectively. This is an aerial map of Shanghai that
was mounted on the server. It shows the area we were dealing with. A lot of
this kind of visual information was available for students to work with. This
is a street of Leilong housing.
The students produced and presented an extraordinary amount of work. It was critiqued by a virtual design jury, for which we did a synchronous hookup of the six different locations. The students presented their projects. They pinned them up inside their space and the critics from the six different locations made their comments. It was a very exciting jury. For those of you who are architects and have been on juries, it had the amazing property that you can shut somebody up just by closing their window. Many architects have wanted to do that. But one needs to handle these things in more subtle ways for them to really work.
We had various different technologies working, and C-U/C-Me, which was the lowest level technologically, is still very interesting. You can see windows open at half a dozen different locations.
I would forget that the students from Hong Kong were looking into my office continually, which was one of the interesting architectual conditions that began to develop. The most intriguing thing about this, as other people have discovered when they've done this sort of thing, is that a true sense of community really can develop even with such a crude situation as you see here. We'd simply leave the windows open and see our friends--and they did become our friends--coming and going in the different locations. And a genuine sense of space began to develop.
S o c i a l a n d C u l t u r a l C o n s e q u e n c e s
I'd like to talk briefly about the social and cultural consequences of this sort of fragmentation and recombination of architectual space, which can take place as we introduce the circulation of bits. What I'd like to suggest to you is that we cannot begin to understand these implications by focusing solely on the logic of cyberspace as if it were an autonomous thing. We have to go beyond the very simplistic view that the infobahn will replace transportation with telecommunication and simply replace bodily presence with telepresence. That it will replace face-to-face meetings with disembodied transactions in cyberspace. What it's actually likely to produce is a considerably more subtle and complex redistribution of functions among buildings, transportation systems and computer networks.
Let me try to illustrate this to you with the homely parable of the pizza parlor, a building type that has gone through some transformations in the United States over the past fifty years or so. Not so long ago, pizza parlors were mostly to be found on Main street. They had advertising signs out front to pull in the customers. They had counters where orders were placed and cash was handed over. They had kitchens where the product was produced. They had spaces with tables and seating. All this was wrapped up in one small building. Customers walked in, made their orders at the counter and ate on the premises. It all worked very well within one particular architectural package. A coherent architectural package located in a particular way in the community.
In the era of the automobile that changed and a competing pattern emerged. The pizza parlor, perhaps by now a chain, didn't just rely on a sign. It advertised in the Yellow Pages and in the mass media. It moved from Main street to a location beside the highway. And it acquired a parking lot to accomodate the cars in which people now came. Many customers now phoned in their orders and had them delivered by car to their homes and workplaces.
This style of operation served a larger, more widely scattered group of customers. The road transportation and telecommunication systems began to play very significant roles in its workings. And its former architectural unity fragmented as consumption shifted from a single seating area to many different customer locations. And Main street began to die as the pizza parlor and other businesses left for more attractive sites. Soon, the old familiar Main street wasn't the place where you went to hang out anymore. The action was elsewhere.
Now, finally, somewhere in the mid-1990s something changed. Let's imagine we're looking back from about the year 2000. The street address became a network address. And the counter became a screen display that allowed the customer at any location to select toppings from a graphic menu, drop them on a virtual pizza, specify the size, see the price, and of course pay with some form of digital cash.
The kitchen transmuted into a nationwide collection of preparation points in locations carefully selected to provide maximum coverage of the market. When an order was received it was automatically routed to the preparation point nearest to the customer's address. The pizza was produced and packaged and it was delivered by radio-controlled vehicle. Now there was no street signs to attract clientele. There was no newspaper or television advertising either. Customers were attracted through storefronts in on line virtual malls and through network yellow pages listings. And there was no place left to eat in public.
Now the details of this story are a little bit fuzzy but I think we can anticipate that the new arrangements were a big hit. The pizza suppliers reached a much larger market. They could optimize their delivery and preparation operation. And more importantly, since customers consumed the product at home, they did not have to build and maintain restaurant facilities in expensive locations. They were out of the table business, waiters were a thing of the past. The customers liked it too, since they could get exactly what they wanted quickly, efficiently and reliably at a low price. But they sometimes missed the atmosphere of the old places. The conversations that developed there. And the opportunities that these places afforded to get out of the house. To meet old friends and make new ones. And to go to a place that made them feel that they were a part of a local community.
And of course, if you didn't have a home, even if you had some old fashioned non-digital coinage in you pocket, you couldn't get a pizza.
What's the conclusion of this? Cities of the near future will meet basic human needs through some combination of architectual settings, transportation systems for goods and our bodies and digi-telecommunications. Introduction of telecommunications doesn't just add new capability, it changes the whole system. It shifts and redistributes functions among various elements and sub-systems of the urban system. And it alters the relationships among the parts. There are potential gains in this new condition but also some important potential losses. Public space can erode. Changes in patterns of accessibility to services and economic opportunities can create winners and losers on a truly massive scale. Perhaps we'll have a situation where reinvigorated local communities with strong electronic connections to a wider world develop. You can imagine electronic Aspens or Palo Altos, Cambridges or Leidens. You can belong simultaneously to a small-scale, local, physically defined community and multiple-interest-defined virtual communities. Perhaps you can present yourself in different guises in different communities.
On the other hand, you can very easily see the development of a distopia consisting of fortified, highly serviced enclaves of domestic space for the priviledged surrounded by marginalized and disenfranchised inhabitants of discarded urban remnants. We could get a digital Jakarta.
The real challenge for architects and urban designers as these conditions change is to find those configurations of built space, transportation and telecommunications. Those combinations are hardware and software that will support the emergence of just, humane and creative communities.
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