Studio BAM

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  • The Architecture of Data Surveillance

    The Architecture of Data Surveillance

    My research investigates the influence of data and related technologies on architectural culture. I’m intrigued by how our methods of measuring the world shape our understanding of reality and how this understanding impacts our actions that, in turn, reshape that reality. The built environment is saturated with data. While buildings might not yet directly engage with data technologies, they support social activities at the service of data production and circulation. This article examines how data surveillance, which is migrating from online to offline spaces, is beginning to impact the role of architecture and its physical products.

    Architectures Response

    To grasp the impact of data surveillance, we first need to comprehend what architecture is and how it intersects with data and technology. This begins with understanding the general role of architecture. Buildings, designed with architectural thought, are complex arrangements of objects and spaces. These spaces – both physical and psychological – provide environments for people to live, work, and thrive. Architecture is crucial in shaping social interactions. It does this by creating spaces that foster idea and belief exchanges, helping to shape our culture. It also communicates visually, through building exteriors and internal spaces. In doing so, architecture uses materials to reflect culture, while also setting the stage for its evolution. Architects, to different extents, consider the existing context in their designs to understand prevalent beliefs and values. Through its spatial arrangements, architecture serves broader social, economic, political, and cultural needs.

    Data subservient to material

    Architecture, which shapes how people move and interact, also influences how people connect with digital networks. This network interaction suggests a new understanding of architecture as the physical space where digital interactions occur, from social chat to finding information and even buying products online. Digital bits, or machine data, set the backdrop for these interactions and help shape people’s decisions. Take a look at private spaces like shopping centres and airports – they’re already designed with this ‘data-influenced’ architecture. Shoshana Zuboff, in her book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’, (Zuboff, 2019) explores how online tracking now impacts our physical world. She emphasises that digital platforms, which make money from excess data, have started influencing physical spaces. The “Smart City” explores data-rich urban development, but generally, these technical projects view architecture and data as separate; inert buildings produce space, while data and analysis provide information. But this is changing. Zuboff uses the example of Sidewalks Lab’s project in Toronto to illustrate how urban planning and design decisions are starting to be shaped by data infrastructure as much as physical space. When precincts aim to maximise data collection for civic and commercial use, infrastructure influences public space design and becomes crucial in architectural plans.

    Toronto Quayside

    The urban plan for Toronto Quayside aimed to use information about the environment to organise its precincts. The approach of Sidewalk Labs was to utilise digital sensors to monitor sound, air quality, light levels, and humidity to determine the most appropriate activities for each area. These activities could be commercial, residential, civic, or industrial. At the root of this approach was an intention to optimise property value and investment returns. The key architectural concept borrowed to enable this optimisation was adaptive space, an approach from the cybernetic 1960s that imagined architecture as a constantly reconfigurable material system.

    The images from Sidewalk Labs offer a glimpse of this adaptive aim. The early renders from Michael Green architects suggest a civic street space organised around temporary furniture and structures that were easily removed or relocated. The images suggest an architecture reduced to a stable and static structural grid obeying the spatial reconfigurable logic of a shopping mall. From a property viewpoint, the concept makes sense. If a business isn’t getting enough attention, it can be readily replaced by one that might make more money. However, data infrastructure increases the speed of this change, suddenly altering the spatial purpose and experience. This change may be easy for those who are conditioned to the rapid change of digital society, but it potentially alienates those who are not digital natives.

    Buildings do not exist forever, but they do serve as a register of time that reflects culture. When buildings reconfigure around data, buildings express a new sense of time, based on information flow. If data is the new backdrop to the urban, surplus becomes the new desire and shapes new expectations for buildings. What happens when a building is reduced to a structure, and its social, cultural and political influence is redistributed to an interior reconfiguration?

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    Toronto Quayside — Early concept by Michael Green Architects

    Material subservient to the data.

    The role of architecture goes beyond being just a structural grid; it’s crucial to consider the wider effects this reduction could have on buildings and urban spaces. Imagine a city where architecture is guided not by human needs, but by data flow—where movements within the city are dictated by the potential value of behavioural information. This approach doesn’t only affect the physical space; it could also reshape our cultural understanding of the city.

    Think about a restaurant in Toronto’s Quayside area. Normally, such a place would make financial decisions based on the lived experiences and social interactions of the street—things like the food culture and daily social use by office workers during the week or families on Sundays. But if these decisions start to be guided by data collected by a landlord or food delivery platform, things change. Small patterns of supply and demand start to influence these financial decisions. This detailed information can be good for business, but it creates two different realities—one shaped by culture and the other by data. As rents increase to reflect commercial potential, those who reflect the cultural life of the street could soon find their rent unaffordable.

    What happens to the life of an urban street if usage changes and human routines are disrupted by this micromanagement of commercial interactions? If culture can’t keep up with the literal view provided by data, does the city stop organising itself around social information?

    It’s not hard to think that city spaces could become available only to those with access to data, serving private interests over the public’s. Some argue that Sidewalk Labs was aiming to create new revenue streams for urban development. While these streams would make a development commercially viable, the focus on data surveillance worryingly risked turning civic space into a profit instrument. In the case of Toronto’s Quayside, this suggested the physical would become secondary to the data.

    Present-day commercial development is financed through real estate value, where the quality of human space indexes to sales or rental returns. When urban space is developed around the value of data, spatial quality is no longer a financial concern, and the focus shifts to technology. Urban space becomes technically optimised rather than designed. This approach also introduces a new framework for measuring success, one based on metrics that align with information flow rather than human experience.

    Consequences for architecture

    The example of Toronto’s Quayside acts as a canary in the coal mine of a future we are heading towards, a situation where data becomes the logic for urban development. As data monitoring becomes part of our physical world and data value management becomes a new contract for the city, architects can either work with these new data rules or counteract them with different development methods. Unfortunately, some architects have given in to developers. They should not be called Architects but ‘Spatial Engineers’. These Spatial Engineers use formulaic design patterns to reveal the hidden potential value in space. Keller Easterling has noted the influence of such spatial engineering in the repeated spatial patterns found in free trade zones and commercial areas worldwide where capital extraction takes precedence over human experience.

    The architect and their architectural creations are at risk of being unable to keep up with the speed of data. As the stability of architecture turns into a data-driven organisation of temporary material arrangements, architects need to either get involved in the speed of data or start contributing to an ethical reappropriation. Architecture needs a vocabulary to participate in the developing smart city discourse and help rebalance human social needs with real-estate extraction.

    In conclusion, the transition towards data-driven urban development presents both challenges and opportunities for architects. As the Toronto’s Quayside example illustrates, cities of the future could be shaped more by data flow than human needs, with profound implications for our shared urban spaces. As architects, we must engage with these changes, either by embracing the new rules of data or by advocating for alternative approaches that balance human social needs with commercial interests. This is not merely a question of architecture, but of society itself. In the data-saturated city of the future, the decisions we make now will shape our collective urban experience for generations to come.

    References

    Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. United States: PublicAffairs.

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  • The Ethics of Data

    The Ethics of Data

    As part of Thomas Fisher’s exploration of ethics in architecture, he considers the influence of data on humanity (Fisher 2018). While his conclusions offer little consideration regarding architecture as a built object, he highlights the relationship between data and humanity’s relationship with nature. In doing so, though, he misses the importance of culture and human emotion on behaviour, assuming that all organisms operate through rational data processing.  

    Data-ism

    Fisher begins by associating data with how organisms and machines sense the world, before concentrating on data’s role in algorithmically produced science. A possible reading of Fisher’s argument is that two scenarios exist involving data and the future of humanity’s influence on the planet, both involving Noah Yuval Harari’s concept of data-ism. The first is a move from a mindset of humans dominance over nature, to one of reciprocal benefit through understanding, communicating and caring for nature. In this scenario, data offers a common ground between humans, animals and machines to relate to each other and produce reciprocally beneficial outcomes. However, Fisher warns that just as data-ism could tend to equality, it could as quickly create a new hierarchy. For Harari data-ism either brings ecological balance through an extended sense of ethics or transposes a new order onto the world defined by a contribution to data flow. In the latter scenario, Fisher argues humans must resist the reductive world view of data-ism through avoiding technologies of data extraction, to prevent their demise.

    Equity

    Unpacking these two scenarios provides some important considerations regarding data. Initially, Fisher considers data’s influence in situation one, a reshaped ethics that brings the natural world, humans and machines together through a common data register. The ecological ethics of data-ism attempts to bring equity to all via data processing, treating human, machine and natural systems as “data processors”. Organism’s existing as biochemical algorithms is a useful concept, but misleading. It is possible to imagine all forms of life as data processors, but it presumes a singular character of data. Through using Harari’s concept, Fisher places the same assumption onto data through either digital or biochemical processing, without considering the existence of the data itself. The comparison between computers and brains relies on data existing in an equivalent format, but this ignores the difference between analogue and digital data, the former recording continuous change in material while the latter encodes discrete state changes as ones and zeros. or bits. Harari acknowledges this difference in Homo Deus speculating that human consciousness could be due to the material analogue rather than symbolic digital logic (Harari 2016, p228). However, Fisher does not acknowledge this; instead he uses data sensing as a premise to explore equality between all organisms, and the relationship between humanity and its technologies.  

    Infosphere

    On reading Fisher’s argument, I recall the theory of Floridi’s “Infosphere” that posits that the machines humans invent always sit in between a user and an unseen helper, what Floridi refers to as a “prompter” (Floridi 2014). While Floridi’s theory is concerned primarily with the future of technology, he draws out a trend relevant to Fisher’s view of data. Floridi provides a history of technology as an evolution of user and prompter starting as a link between humanity and nature, then between humanity and technology, before a third-order that removes the human “user” and replaces organisms with machines, thus predicting a human removal from technological development. Floridi describes this as humans no longer existing in the loop of innovation but “on the loop”, predicting humans progress from users to beneficiaries (Floridi 2014). Fisher and Floridi speculate on a different ethical relationship resulting from a new understanding of humanity as beneficiaries of technology and nature rather than users. In this move, both Floridi and Fisher introduce data’s influence on humanity through the way technology influences culture, but only Floridi recognises that culture sets the requirements for technology in the first place.

    Data Processing

    While it is arguable data exits as a constant between material and binary representation, the latter is a purely machine-interpretable version of data; humans cannot register nor semantically interpret digital data. Therefore, while I agree with Fisher, Harari and Floridi that data exists as reality before sensory experience, there is a problem in presuming that life is simply data processing through algorithms. The data processing view cannot consider the influence of culture, which requires as much consideration as nature and technology. While theoretically, nature and technology can interact through data, cultures rely on human interpretation into information, which in turn relies on human-constructed systems of meaning. Culture, understood as the social norms and beliefs negotiated between humans, both respond to and influence our understanding of nature and technology, meaning that any prediction of non-anthropocentric futures must resist the hyper-rational world view that data seduces. From an ethical viewpoint, Fisher misses the role of culture in modulating human understanding of reality through nature and technology.

    Complexity

    Tegmark’s theory of artificial intelligence provides a useful set of ideas for thinking about culture and data. In Tegmark’s explanation of life as an evolving process of replication and retention of complexity, he argues three stages of development occur, an initially grown biological, then designed culturally and finally learnt computationally (Tegmark 2017). Similarly to Floridi, Tegmark’s interest lies in the future of intelligent technology, but a point of difference is Tegmark’s discussion of culture’s influence on the industrial revolution and future technology, the human need to retain and pass on information. It is fashionable to think of machines as having independence from humanity and culture in the way dystopian futures predict unchecked technological evolution. Many of these futures ignore the cultural reason technology came to be in the first place. Both architecture and technology respond to culture, in turn helping to reshape it, but architecture and technology cannot come into existence through self-interest, they require assistance from humans.

    Culture

    In the rapid progression of science through algorithmic data analysis, it is easy to presume data as a given and overlook the influence of culture. The digital humanities, however, increasingly recognise data as a captured sample of reality shaped by the technology used. The act of experiencing and measuring the world sets up a circular relationship, one where world view sets a framework for acting, which then perversely produces data to support the world view. Rob Kitchin refers to this framework as a “socio-technical assemblage” of people, institutions, apparatus and beliefs that shape complex systems of data production (Kitchin). Kitchin’s concept is useful to critique Fisher’s argument for a human resistance of data-flow presuming that data-ism exists through the intentions of machines, rather than humans themselves. The perceived threat of superior data analysis and processing by machines would only offer a danger to humanity if it exclusively helped solve machine problems. But as I have argued, technology is ultimately shaped through human needs and solving machine problems should ultimately help humans, machines and nature. Where the real hierarchical imbalance could occur is that humans use the superior analysis they developed, to further benefit themselves at nature’s expense, rather than using it to come closer to nature. Any consideration of data and technology in the future of humanity must include the importance of shaping cultures around social equality across all life or a continued inequality between humans and other organisms. Data’s real effect, therefore, is in shifting or maintaining the human world view, which means that data does not create the future, culture does.

    Fisher, Thomas, 2018, *The Architecture of Ethics*, Routledge

    Floridi, Luciano, 2014, *The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality*, OUP Oxford

    Harari, Yuval Noah, 2016, *Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow*, Random House

    Kitchin, Rob, 2014, *The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences*, Sage UK

    Tegmark, Max, 2017, *Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence*, Penguin UK

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  • Sheds of Australia: Retrofitting the Backyard Battler

    Sheds of Australia: Retrofitting the Backyard Battler

    According to a report by Grand View Research, the global garden sheds market size was valued at USD 2.3 billion in 2020, and it is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.8% from 2021 to 2028. The iconic backyard shed is a staple of the Australian landscape. Long a symbol of the self-reliance and practicality of the Aussie spirit, sheds have become so ubiquitous in our backyards as to be taken for granted. But, let’s be honest, they are crap and are completely unsuitable for the Australian climate. However, an opportunity exists to retrofit these metal shacks to become energy efficient, comfortable, and even beautiful with a little effort.

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    The ubiquitous shed

    Ubiquitous

    The quintessential Aussie backyard shed, thin, lightweight and stinking hot in the summer. The shed is a prime example of industrial construction, sold and transported as flat-pack DIY kits made up of mass-produced components. The shed is a quick, easy, cheap and cheerful option for storage or working, but it has so much more to offer. The benefits of sheds are that they are light, easy to construct and have structural support.

    The drawback is that they are flimsy and are a hotbox in summer and a fridge in winter. I don’t mind the look of a shed, it reminds me of the country, but with a little tweaking with openings and support, they could be so much better.  The greatest benefit of the shed is that it provides shelter to build.

    Constructing on-site is always at the mercy of the elements, but if a shed shell already exists, work can continue on the inside. This scenario radically changes typical architectural staging, which works from floor to roof to walls to weather seal. With a lightweight shed exterior, the interior is already weatherproof and is ready for extra structure, insulation and interior finishes.

    Potential

    Its true potential is as an incubator for architecture. While the Aussie battler shed sits sweltering in all its glory, a new building starts to assemble inside. As the inner architecture grows it adds material to stabilise and support the flimsy metal surfaces, soon taking over from the thin aluminium frame and using the corrugated steel as a new skin, piercing in places to reach light or snatch views of next doors swimming pool. In this sense, the backyard battler reminds me of a miniature version of Ernst Neufert’s 1943 House Building Machine, whose lightweight scaffold moved along a building providing shelter for construction, minus the links to Albert Speer.

    The best outcome would be for the retrofit to exist as sharable information, perhaps a self-help manual for adapting and improving existing sheds with easily accessible materials. Or even an online configurator to “pimp my shed’ which outputs instructions rather than a Bunnings product. A new architecture emerges, born from the country grit of the shed, but now fancy enough that a writer can pose in it in Dezeen. This is the shed’s true destiny, this is what it truly wants, and strewth, this is what it will get.

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  • Repair and Dystopia

    Repair and Dystopia

    It’s a dreary Sunday afternoon, the kind that begs for introspection or escape. I stand at the window, watching the drizzle, feeling a similar unrest churn inside me. The choice is simple yet strangely pivotal—accompany Harriet on a hopeful, damp walk or seek solace in another world through a film. I choose the latter, whispering an apology to Harriet as she settles back on her bed. I scroll through the streaming service, pausing as ‘Vesper’ catches my eye—a dystopian science fiction movie set in a world I feel oddly drawn to today. Vesper is a 14-year-old survivor of an ecological disaster where humanity accidentally unleashes viruses, devastating populations and ecosystems. In Vesper’s world, the air is thick with the must of decay and rebirth as grotesque creatures—akin to Lovecraft’s dark fantasies—slither and flutter, their new forms both terrifying and mesmerising. In the resulting post-apocalyptic society, biohacking is the main technology. It is a confronting watch as the many human-made things I take for granted – such as electricity and digital technology — no longer exist. This world has been plunged back into an analogue age.

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    Vesper as she engineers seeds.

    Eroding Environments

    In one scene, Vesper intricately weaves organic circuits to nurture seeds for food. Her backdrop vividly reminds me of Phillip Beasley’s ‘Sibyl,’ installed at the 18th Biennale of Sydney. Sibyl presented a sprawling network of synthetic fronds that responded to human presence. The echo of life emerging from artifice in both works fascinates me, blurring the lines between organic life and engineered existence. Similar to Cockatoo Islands’s post-industrial decay, the film is set in post-environmental disaster, where building maintenance comes second to scavenging for resources. The result is an eroded environment, where you are desperate for the characters to bust out the spray and wipe, or fix a door. In another similar scene, Vesper repairs a drone that connects to her paralysed dad’s consciousness. The drone is organic and somewhat mystical as it does not defy any physical logic, but I know it is not digital. As Vesper repairs the drone, she wields strange tools and apparatus, their origins obscure—are they relics salvaged from before the disaster, or innovations born from necessity afterward? Science fiction often serve future visions where shiny electronic digital devices augment our existence; I find the sight of analogue tubes and flasks confronting, eerily mirroring the body’s inner workings providing a stark, unsettling reminder of how technology mimics life.

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    Vesper accompanied by her organic ‘dad’ drone

    The key to Vespa’s narrative is organic technology. From the previously mentioned drone that resembles Tom Hank’s castaway companion Wilson, to the genetically transformed and menacing flowers and insects, the organic environment has no trace of generated electricity. The portrayal of a dystopian dark age future as one of decay interestingly aligns architecture with the environment. As nature slowly tries to kill humanity, the built environment follows suit, abandoning its purpose of shelter as it succumbs to entropy. In the scenes depicting everyday victims of organic pollution, the pervasive use of rotten wood, eroded concrete, and tattered fabrics not only portrays their poverty but also deepens our empathy for their desperation and fight for survival. These materials provide meaning to their plight, but is this decay a logical conclusion of dystopia?

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    Vesper’s house, full of decaying materials

    It is interesting to think about what repair requires. What stops humans from repairing and maintaining buildings. I can think of a few;

    Materials

    Access to materials is a major factor. If glass, or concrete or wood decays, how do you replace or rejuvenate if there are no more materials? The reality is that two of the previous materials are man made, and all three are industrially produced. If societal collapse was as drastic as in Vesper, then the materials we take for granted would be unavailable unless stockpiled for future use. The alternative would be to use the materials at hand, but you are soon faced with the problem of processing trees and mud into forms that perform and look similar. Without access to the production and supply logistics we rely on, it is reasonable that maintenance would become ad hoc and resemble a patchwork of recycled materials.

    Knowledge and Skill

    The second issue would be the availability of material and construction information. The film does not suggest all books disappeared, but there is a subtext that the population reduced due to the pollution. Consequently, fewer people would know how to repair and maintain, as often this is passed on through an oral tradition (and YouTube). Take away the the key people, and the lineage of hand craft knowledge breaks down, leaving structures to slowly break down. In this particular dystopian future, organic drones such as Wilson could plug that gap, but we are never convinced that this is a priority, they have bigger fish to fry, if fish were available and not now hideously mutated.

    Tools

    Another key aspect of repair are tools. Humans rely on their dexterity to achieve tasks, but the majority of fixing, joining, attaching, shaping, cutting, smoothing and covering require tools. In the chaos of escaping the initial disaster, if survivors fail to secure essential tools, they find themselves severely handicapped. The ability to create new tools from scratch, especially without existing metallurgical skills, is a daunting, if not impossible, task. Again, you could foreseeably create new tools in a McGeiver style, but without black smith skills you will not fashion the metal instruments that we use in our everyday DIY.

    Time

    The last consideration is time. It takes a conscious effort to stop and make an effort to repair. If you have other pressing needs, like trying to stay alive, maintenance takes a back seat. Thus, in such dire circumstances, the luxury of time for repairs is reserved for those few who have managed to secure their immediate survival needs—making maintenance a privilege rather than a routine aspect of life. Materials and structures will always break down as molecules and atoms tend to disorder — the second law of thermodynamics — but it is the time difference between entropy and re-order through repair that results in the derelict aesthetic.

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    One of many buildings patched up with recycled materials.

    The pervasive decay in ‘Vesper’ might suggest a rapid deterioration of both the built and natural environments, yet this comparison is slightly misleading. Buildings do not ‘die’; they simply break down without maintenance. The film’s dystopian aesthetic powerfully symbolises a deeper societal collapse: the loss of production processes, material knowledge, craft skills, and the tools we often take for granted. After my initial frustration with the crumbling staircases in the movie—yes, I too wondered why no one would just fix that step—I came to understand the profound connection between societal health and the ability to maintain our infrastructure. Our buildings depend heavily on industrially produced materials and parts, resources that would likely vanish following a drastic population decline. Vesper made me consider our current environmental strategies; perhaps we should prioritise locally produced and easily repairable materials. Such foresight could be crucial if we are to prevent, or at least mitigate, a potential genetic catastrophe.

  • Running out of STEAM

    Running Out of Steam

    In 2016, I presented a paper “Running out of STE(A)M: A Critical Perspective on the Political Rhetoric of Innovation” at the Australian Architectural School Association (AASA) conference held at the University of Technology Sydney. The title for the event was “Project to practice: Innovating Architecture” and focused on two significant questions, where is architecture creating its future, and how is the sector shaping the policy and funding levers of tomorrow? My paper argued that state governments, in particular, the liberal Australian government, used innovation as a political tool and positions information and knowledge as sources of capital generation. While architects provide creativity and innovation, they cannot access the profits.

    Information Vectors

    The paper argued that there are assumptions and hidden strategies that lie in the use of innovation as an economic strategy that attempts to extract value from the control of information flow and how innovation provides corporations and institutions wealth from knowledge. The paper aimed to demonstrate that the paradigm of resource manipulation, where a perceived scarcity and market demand drives the price of natural materials, had been transferred onto the realm of data, information and knowledge, or as McKenzie Wark puts it, had created a “vectorization of information”^1.

    This vectorization occurs through the placement of capitalist ideology, property ownership and the logic of market-based value extraction, onto an abundant resource. I was then, and am still now, critical of capitalism for its rampant demand for “growth” and “progress” which translates into often unethical exploitation of the biosphere for profit generation. I’m also critical of the unequal distribution of wealth capitalism has produced and its boom to bust cyclic nature that governments treat as a necessary evil.

    Ideas Boom

    The name “Running out of STE(A)M” was a response to the Australian government’s “Ideas Boom” policy that sought to increase Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths in schools, aiming to establish innovation in the future. My main critique was in the loss of art as a necessary connection back to everyday life, and a counter to the observed trend of innovation for innovation’s sake within STEM. When art is compared within a framework of efficiency, productivity and return on investment, it simply cannot compete. The creative and cultural industry provided $86 billion in 2014 but only contributed 6.9% of the overall GDP (ABS); as a result, many Australian states cut arts funding. An economic lens applied to a critical cultural driver misses art’s role in society, to provide alternative means of understanding our world.

    The only culture that the ideas boom referred to in 2016 was to tech startup and entrepreneurial culture, which I was also critical. The US has shown how vital tech innovation and startups can be in generating wealth, and how crucial entrepreneurial thinking is towards this. It is not surprising, therefore, that every government wants to replicate a version of Silicon Valley. This carbon copying of a unique industrial complex is problematic as beyond economic success the Silicon Valley model has shown to have issues with social elitism^2, sexism^3 and racism^4 in its drive to make the world “a better place”.

    The promotion of startup culture and STEM in schools redistribute the pressures of business and drive for profit into an environment which should support free exploration and discovery. The promoted vision that entrepreneurs, startups and tech innovation can lead to fame and wealth a-la a Musk or Zuckerberg, should not be a driver of knowledge generation at the school level. Rather than conforming to an existing political and financial system, it should provide the foundation for its students to imagine something better in the future.

    Designing Scarcity

    The ideas around the paper referred heavily to Goodbun, Klein, Till and Rumpfhuber’s enlightening book “The Design of Scarcity” ^5 that describes how architects are complicit in maintaining scarcity within the capitalist system through desire, I thoroughly recommend it. Within the paper, I use the design of scarcity to argue that within an innovation framework of STEM the outcomes of architectural design and innovation become monetised by those with the means of capital accumulation, namely developers. Subsequently, decisions towards built outcomes align towards maximising return on investment and by those with the economic means of production. On large commercial projects, the architectural profession has found itself engaged in maximising gains through generating value in the building as a commodity. “Value Engineering” has become the driving parameter of spatial outcomes and the socially aligned profession of architecture, becomes subservient to corporations.

    The paper concluded with some ways that architects could avoid being complicit in capitalism’s misfortunes. In summary, it looked at how architects could move towards socially concerned development, realign design focus away from buildings as commodities, and shift the mindset to celebrate the abundant rather than controlling scarcity. As Carlo Ratti and others have proposed architects should redirect their innovative energy towards developing an ecological view of buildings, its ambition should be to generate value through the processes and relations that come before and after a built outcome.

    Social-Use Value

    I proposed that new data technologies such as the Blockchain could provide ways to develop alternative sources of revenue through fostering community and social use-value. Although I cringe when I refer back to the paper and presentation for its limited understanding of the Blockchain, which I now understand in greater detail, I still hold by the claim, it could help circumnavigate markets monopolised and controlled by those acting as economic mediaries in the built environment.

    In Jeremy Rifkin’s book Zero Marginal Cost Society ^6 he semi convincingly describes how abundance will soon become a condition due to innovation within our energy, communications and transport infrastructures. This abundance does not benefit from exclusive access and control, it wants to be shared, but this is a difficult financial relationship to convince architects. Professional practices are forced to protect their work and ideas in an economy that rely on property law and resource ownership. Ideas and knowledge are an abundant resource, but this energy is wasted within a system which values creativity so cheaply that it expects free entry into design competitions like it is a passionate hobby. Architects need to realise that a collective pooling of resources, knowledge and ideas will reciprocate input and ultimately benefit the built environment. The creation of an architectural commons, similar to open source projects or Wikipedia, could achieve this. Peer to peer collaboration and production, where sharing is the dominant mode of operation, has been shown to thrive on social benefit rather than wealth and can allocate resources based on need rather than under economic or managerial influence ^7. In an environment of sharing, value shifts towards the benefit of the community, rather than supply and demand.

    Increased digital connectivity and an ethical tracking of people and things could provide evidence of action to environmental or humanitarian benefits. While this risks digital surveillance, it could help humans move away from an economic system which is unable to detect pricing impact beyond its immediate availability and current need. Sharing of architectural resources would not result in impoverished communism that forces equality onto a collective; it is what Michel Bauwen’s refers to as “Collective Individuality” where individual economic gain correlates to effort placed on a greater good.

    Capitalism isn’t going anywhere soon, but that doesn’t mean architects have to settle for it. They should start to covertly explore alternatives, try and avoid the proprietary and profit-driven nature of markets forces and realign its energy towards the provision of a fair and just society with an abundance of fulfilling cultures.

    References

    Bauwens, M. (2005) The Political Economy of Peer Production M. Kroker & A. Kroker, eds. CTheory

    Bauwens, M. (2005) The Political Economy of Peer Production. M. Kroker & A. Kroker, eds. CTheory

    Goodbun, J. Klein, M. Till, Jeremy. & Rumpfhuber, A. (2013) The Design of Scarcity, Strelka Press: Moscow

    Kosoff, M. (2016) Does Silicon Valley Have a Racism Problem? Vanity Fair.

    Rifkin, J., (2014). The zero marginal cost society, New York, NY : Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

    Watson, R. (2016) In Silicon Valley, Young white males are stealing the future from everyone else.The Guardian

    Wark, M. (2004) A Hacker Manifesto, Harvard University Press

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  • Taking a Line for a Walk

    Part of my exploration of 3D printing is learning about other practices and their approaches. A key influence is Unfold Studio in Belgium, Claire Warnier & Dries Verbruggen, who’s 3d printing philosophy is to ‘think in lines’. When it comes to 3d printing, a common starting point is to model virtual objects and then release them onto a 3d printer via a slicing software. This approach focuses purely on the object and does not consider the uniqueness of 3D printing, which is its ability to deposit material in a Cartesian XYZ plotting space. ‘Thinking in lines’ takes the opposite approach, it starts with understanding the 3d printer and then designing virtual objects through the logic of a 3D continuously plotted path. The outcome are objects that procedurally build up and, in some cases, express lines as a feature. A great example is Unfold’s experiments with ceramic printing that celebrate the line as an aesthetic.

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    Unfold Design Studio – Experiments atAlfred University

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    Having control of the line requires expertise in virtual modelling that I will explore through this blog, namely through G Code. I will write more about this in future, but essentially instead of modelling a 3D digital object in a software package, generating machine readable ‘G Code’ allows direct communication with the printer to provide more creative control.

    Unfold’s approach reminds me of Paul Klee’s saying ‘a drawing is simply a line going for a walk’. In Klee’s case, the drawing exists on a 2d x,y coordinate plane, and pen variables include direction, line weight, colour, and speed. Taking a 3d printed line for a 3d walk adds complexity and requires careful calibration of additional variables, such as z height, material behaviour and flow rate. My practice will start with creating virtual objects to learn the 3d printing machine and its affordances. At first my files will be simply sliced to print in layers, but at some point, I intend to describe how to build an object through a material line, and then explore how machine code instruction can generate difference when released into the world of atoms.

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