"Digital technology contradicts the very essence of masonry construction, says Alex Haw of Atmos
The skylines of certain cities read like archival graphs of economic performance, their profile rising and crashing in a frozen pixellated line. The resolute grey monoliths read like tombstones, arrayed like breakwaters in a mighty defence against the passage of time. The sun rises and flashes across them, and is gone; except in our deepest traumas, they persist unaffected, and their unchanging nature endures.
All that glass – our most lavish fetish – promises superficial optical effects but denies any solar effect, or any real transformation; labyrinthine servicing arrangements guarantee an uninflected internal climate irrespective of external conditions. Even cemeteries shift, overtaken by mossy outgrowths, their gravestones melting and extravagantly tilting in a paean to the sorts of nomadic foundations that buildings could never accept.
Architecture takes time – one of the many reasons we want it to last so long. Its tradition aims to refute time; at best, it ‘weathers’, slowly and imperceptibly. But increasingly, architecture IS time; a temporal medium that measures out not only our occupation of space, but also our occupation of time. The traditionally inert becomes increasingly intelligent, responsive, glimmering into life, sensitive and responsive to its context; an actor as well as backdrop.
One of architecture's greatest challenges is the revolution of mass; the making of mute matter smart. Our air is swimming with waves and forces, bursting with electromagnetic intelligence in which our solids are only slowly saturating themselves. Buildings typically treat digitality like sound or rain; they suppress it rather than build with it. Rooms dampen rather than augment electromagnetic signals; the blank and comforting Faraday cages of our home environments exclude the noise and buzz of our daytime software immersions. Digital technology contradicts the very essence of masonry construction.
A vast proportion of avant-garde urban technology reclaims its etymology; much of it is military. The US military’s invention of Radarscope demolishes architecture at the flick of a switch, its phone-sized handset effortlessly scanning through twelve inches of solid concrete; its companion technology EMMDAR easily detects human signs of presence behind those walls[1].
DARPA (the Pentagon’s research arm) is currently developing a raft of other curiosities like the Urban Hopping Robot, The Nano Air Vehicle, Z-man technology that enables soldiers to scale walls like geckos, or the UAV armed with a Multiple Explosively Formed Penetrator – a lethal Frisbee that can ‘locate defiladed combatants in complex urban terrain’ and annihilate them using a bunker-buster warhead. They have a slew of other technologies dedicated to demolishing the limits of buildings, most recently unveiling the HIBR (Harnessing Infrastructure for Building Reconnaissance) portable backpack system[2] that aims to generate total 3D information about buildings.
Normally, drawings produce buildings; DARPA reverses this, producing drawings from buildings, like Microsoft with its Photosynth technology reconstructing cities from optical analysis of their photographic documents. It's like a Hollywood rematch between military and civilian, Google vs. DARPA; who’ll scan and recreate our cities first? In what's been described as Bourne meets YouTube, DARPA also revealed only this week that they plan to monitor real-time and archival video streams for ‘activity of interest’[3], demolishing the limitations of distance as they zoom in to handshakes from distant aerial cameras.
Since walls have always had a defensive role, it's not difficult to see the pervasive creep of this technology into our everyday architecture; the activation of our spaces not only as sensors, but as weapons. Take the evolution of CCTV; the remote electronic eye, once simply passive and receptive, is increasingly active and interventionist. Designated actions now trigger increasingly-popular speaking cameras to hurl sounds at their targets; the US military’s SWORDS remote-sniper robot, recently operational in both Iraq and Afghanistan, shows how easily these sounds might become camera-activated bullets. It's been over a year since Taser International launched their automated TRAD, or Taser Remote Area Denial, robotically triggering Taser attacks in their ‘denial’ of spatial access; strong evidence that the most effective wall is wafer-thin and electronic, and that bricks and mortar are only the first, fairly feeble, line of defence. Climate control becomes so much more powerful when its control system is also ballistic.
The holy grail is smart dust, technology pursued for almost a decade by a number of companies for environments from cities to airports to warzones, where every conceivable surface can be sprayed with a mesh network of grain-sized sensors that might relay information on anything from internal temperature to humidity levels, chart movement patterns, log human speech and generally fulfil objectives that outreach the most fertile of imaginations. We already see the evolution of the door and wall into a prosthetic enhancement, an extension of our hand or skin or iris, our fragile wetware replacing stolid ironmongery as the key for unlocking and penetrating architecture. Smart dust might be embedded on our very bodies, further dissolving the boundary between person & space, us and it, as our own portable surfaces begin to sense and control the space around us.
Our architectural work at atmos is rather more propositional and constructive than the analytic, tactical and invasive procedures employed by the military. We seek to re-enliven architecture with the forces that surround it, to replace incipient moribundity with constant activity, to use data as building material and information as blood. Our projects seek to embed spaces with cycles of life, regeneration and change; they embrace instability and adaptation. Beyond architecture's deep traditions of biomimeticism and nature-worship, we seek methods for architecture to stimulate and simulate active growth as much as represent its history; to embed forms and spaces with the actuality and ever-changing richness of life forces, not just their image or gestational process. We seek ways for computation to inform the product, not just the process, sewing spaces with reactive nervous systems. We have no inherent predisposition to buildings, but design environments that constantly update, constantly redraw themselves in an unending series of revisions and a permanent instability of informational flux. Postwar, post-MTV, post-broadband, we willingly seek speed; life is fast and over before we know it.
a t m o s
14 bacon street , off brick lane . london . e1 6lf . uk . m+44(0)7815.040.619 . www.atmosstudio.com . mail@atmosstudio.com ."
In http://www.rudi.net/node/20609
The skylines of certain cities read like archival graphs of economic performance, their profile rising and crashing in a frozen pixellated line. The resolute grey monoliths read like tombstones, arrayed like breakwaters in a mighty defence against the passage of time. The sun rises and flashes across them, and is gone; except in our deepest traumas, they persist unaffected, and their unchanging nature endures.
All that glass – our most lavish fetish – promises superficial optical effects but denies any solar effect, or any real transformation; labyrinthine servicing arrangements guarantee an uninflected internal climate irrespective of external conditions. Even cemeteries shift, overtaken by mossy outgrowths, their gravestones melting and extravagantly tilting in a paean to the sorts of nomadic foundations that buildings could never accept.
Architecture takes time – one of the many reasons we want it to last so long. Its tradition aims to refute time; at best, it ‘weathers’, slowly and imperceptibly. But increasingly, architecture IS time; a temporal medium that measures out not only our occupation of space, but also our occupation of time. The traditionally inert becomes increasingly intelligent, responsive, glimmering into life, sensitive and responsive to its context; an actor as well as backdrop.
One of architecture's greatest challenges is the revolution of mass; the making of mute matter smart. Our air is swimming with waves and forces, bursting with electromagnetic intelligence in which our solids are only slowly saturating themselves. Buildings typically treat digitality like sound or rain; they suppress it rather than build with it. Rooms dampen rather than augment electromagnetic signals; the blank and comforting Faraday cages of our home environments exclude the noise and buzz of our daytime software immersions. Digital technology contradicts the very essence of masonry construction.
A vast proportion of avant-garde urban technology reclaims its etymology; much of it is military. The US military’s invention of Radarscope demolishes architecture at the flick of a switch, its phone-sized handset effortlessly scanning through twelve inches of solid concrete; its companion technology EMMDAR easily detects human signs of presence behind those walls[1].
DARPA (the Pentagon’s research arm) is currently developing a raft of other curiosities like the Urban Hopping Robot, The Nano Air Vehicle, Z-man technology that enables soldiers to scale walls like geckos, or the UAV armed with a Multiple Explosively Formed Penetrator – a lethal Frisbee that can ‘locate defiladed combatants in complex urban terrain’ and annihilate them using a bunker-buster warhead. They have a slew of other technologies dedicated to demolishing the limits of buildings, most recently unveiling the HIBR (Harnessing Infrastructure for Building Reconnaissance) portable backpack system[2] that aims to generate total 3D information about buildings.
Normally, drawings produce buildings; DARPA reverses this, producing drawings from buildings, like Microsoft with its Photosynth technology reconstructing cities from optical analysis of their photographic documents. It's like a Hollywood rematch between military and civilian, Google vs. DARPA; who’ll scan and recreate our cities first? In what's been described as Bourne meets YouTube, DARPA also revealed only this week that they plan to monitor real-time and archival video streams for ‘activity of interest’[3], demolishing the limitations of distance as they zoom in to handshakes from distant aerial cameras.
Since walls have always had a defensive role, it's not difficult to see the pervasive creep of this technology into our everyday architecture; the activation of our spaces not only as sensors, but as weapons. Take the evolution of CCTV; the remote electronic eye, once simply passive and receptive, is increasingly active and interventionist. Designated actions now trigger increasingly-popular speaking cameras to hurl sounds at their targets; the US military’s SWORDS remote-sniper robot, recently operational in both Iraq and Afghanistan, shows how easily these sounds might become camera-activated bullets. It's been over a year since Taser International launched their automated TRAD, or Taser Remote Area Denial, robotically triggering Taser attacks in their ‘denial’ of spatial access; strong evidence that the most effective wall is wafer-thin and electronic, and that bricks and mortar are only the first, fairly feeble, line of defence. Climate control becomes so much more powerful when its control system is also ballistic.
The holy grail is smart dust, technology pursued for almost a decade by a number of companies for environments from cities to airports to warzones, where every conceivable surface can be sprayed with a mesh network of grain-sized sensors that might relay information on anything from internal temperature to humidity levels, chart movement patterns, log human speech and generally fulfil objectives that outreach the most fertile of imaginations. We already see the evolution of the door and wall into a prosthetic enhancement, an extension of our hand or skin or iris, our fragile wetware replacing stolid ironmongery as the key for unlocking and penetrating architecture. Smart dust might be embedded on our very bodies, further dissolving the boundary between person & space, us and it, as our own portable surfaces begin to sense and control the space around us.
Our architectural work at atmos is rather more propositional and constructive than the analytic, tactical and invasive procedures employed by the military. We seek to re-enliven architecture with the forces that surround it, to replace incipient moribundity with constant activity, to use data as building material and information as blood. Our projects seek to embed spaces with cycles of life, regeneration and change; they embrace instability and adaptation. Beyond architecture's deep traditions of biomimeticism and nature-worship, we seek methods for architecture to stimulate and simulate active growth as much as represent its history; to embed forms and spaces with the actuality and ever-changing richness of life forces, not just their image or gestational process. We seek ways for computation to inform the product, not just the process, sewing spaces with reactive nervous systems. We have no inherent predisposition to buildings, but design environments that constantly update, constantly redraw themselves in an unending series of revisions and a permanent instability of informational flux. Postwar, post-MTV, post-broadband, we willingly seek speed; life is fast and over before we know it.
a t m o s
14 bacon street , off brick lane . london . e1 6lf . uk . m+44(0)7815.040.619 . www.atmosstudio.com . mail@atmosstudio.com ."
In http://www.rudi.net/node/20609
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