This is part of the Graveyard of Dead Abstracts project
On varying scales from the texture of a door handle to the programmatic layout of a community centre, 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 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. Artefacts 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 definitely modified.
The house, amongst the most intimate of architectures, and an environment significantly altered by technology in the twentieth century, constitutes a fertile site for examining this modification. Over the last 60 years, our houses have been increasingly augmented with electronic technology, from simple household appliances to 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, as well as new engagements with industrial, economic, and information networks. Our new technologies imply new definitions of ‘home’. For my Ph.D. research at _____ 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 behaviour and socialization? Further, I am interested in how we experience the space of digital information, and how this space may supplement or augment physical space. I am fascinated by these changes in our intimate architecture, what they mean for us on a personal level, and what they imply about our changing economic, political and sociological conditions. I believe that this has yet to be adequately investigated, and that a deeper consideration will be valuable both for academics and architects interested in the future of the domestic environment.
The Professional Master of Architecture degree at the University of Waterloo in which I am currently enrolled will be completed at the end of December 2009. My Bachelor of Architectural Studies was also from Waterloo and was completed in 2006. Over the past seven years, interspersed with periods of study, I have worked both locally and internationally as an architectural intern and as an intern journalist. My eight years of study in architecture and my experience designing custom homes puts me in a good position to study the architectural implications of emerging technology. My readings in philosophy and cultural theory make me also advantageously prepared to study the broader cultural implications of the technology.
My master’s thesis, titled “Between Technological Flesh and the Technological Field”, was a phenomenological probing (following Gaston Bachelard[i] and Juhani Pallasmaa[ii]) 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 a similar problem from both a more historical perspective and with reference to a different set of theorists such as Don Ihde, Alain Badiou, and Bruno Latour, as well as Slavoj Žižek and António Damásio.
One of the key weaknesses in my earlier research was an implicit technological determinism. Culture must not be seen as dependent upon material conditions. As Foucault argued we should not assume that there is a direct causal relationship between material change and cultural change,[iii] but rather an interconnection between them. Looking forward, the concept of the actor-network seems to offer a valuable means of speaking about this in which artefacts may be seen engaged in the evolution of culture alongside people.[iv] According to actor-network theory, networks form and transform as a web of relations between people and their things. The cultures of our houses, it may be said, develop with our things intimately involved, but our things may not be held responsible for that culture. One method of study I intend to employ in unravelling this interconnection is to systematically review depictions of the house as they have appeared in architectural periodicals, in lifestyle magazines, and in popular scientific and technological journals. This research shall be informed by an in-depth historical study of my targeted era so that the changes in technology being examined may be understood in their larger economic, political and social context.
......
[ii] Juhani Palasmaa, “Identity, Intimacy and Domicile” http://www2.uiah.fi/opintoasiat/history2/pallas.htm (accessed 16 December 2009)
[iii] Michel Foucault, “Space, Power, Knowledge” in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993), 134-41.
[iv] Bruno Latour, "Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts" in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker & John Law (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), 225–258.
No comments:
Post a Comment