Architecture plays a very close role in our lives . . .

This is part of the Graveyard of Dead Abstracts project.

Architecture plays a very close role in our lives, engaging in our everyday projects of becoming ourselves and of understanding the world. When architecture satisfies our needs and our desires it gives form to our condition. It renders morphological our values and our ‘ways of living’ and then it passes these back to us. Artifacts designed to satisfy material needs thus gain potent psychological and social value. While architecture’s role as a medium for working out important aspects of our condition and in giving this condition concrete form is not negated by the increasing incorporation of advanced technology into our buildings, the precise manner in which architecture frames our existence is most definitely modified.

The house, the most intimate of architectures, and an environment significantly altered by technology in the twentieth century, constitutes, from my perspective, a fertile site for examining this modification. Over the last 60 years, our houses have been increasingly augmented with electronic technology, beginning with appliances such as toasters and vacuums but also including more complex technology such as televisions, security systems and home networks. These devices imply new relations between the inside of the house and the outside and new engagements with industrial, economic, and information networks. Our new technologies imply new definitions of ‘home’. I would like to investigate how digital information can positively affect our experience of domesticity rather than eroding it. What exactly occurs, phenomenologically and psychologically, when everyday objects become embedded with sensing and processing technology and become increasingly enabled to make decisions and take actions of their own? I am interested in how we engage with these new devices, these new elements of the domestic landscape. What happens to the role they played in our lives as symbols and foci of socialization and behaviour? How do we experience the space of digital information, and how can this space supplement or augment physical space?

My research interest lies in these changes in our intimate architecture, what they mean for us on a personal level, and what they imply about changing economic, political and sociological conditions. How does the technologization of the middle-class house over the period of1945-2010 reflect changing notions of the ‘individual’, ‘family’, and ‘home’? This is the central question to be addressed by my research. I believe that this question has not yet been adequately investigated, and deeper consideration will be valuable both for academics and architects interested in the future of the domestic environment.

My master’s thesis addressed a very similar problem. Titled “Between Technological Flesh and the Technological Field”, it was an attempt at a phenomenological probing (following Gaston Bachelard and Juhani Pallasmaa) of both technological development and of the traditional house. This work culminated in a series of evocative artistic renderings of key points in the house as they were altered by technology. My doctoral research will approach the problem from both a more historical perspective and with reference to a different set of theorists.

One of the key errors in my earlier research I feel was an implicit technological determinism. Culture must not be seen as dependent upon material conditions. I believe that the concept of the actor-network offers a valuable means of escape from both this determinism and from social constructivism by speaking about artifacts as also engaged in the evolution of culture alongside people (Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses”, 1992). According to actor-network theory, networks form and transform as a web of relations between people and their things. The cultures of our houses in particular, it may be said, develop with our things intimately involved, but it is also important not to hold these things responsible for this development. Additionally, I think that António Damásio’s arguments about the embodiment of consciousness, together with Hubert Dreyfus’ critiques of artificial intelligence provide a useful foundation for discussing the future of the virtual in the house.