Unlimited-Continuous-Finite-Faraway and Contiguous
“Our period demands a type of man who can restore the lost equilibrium between inner and outer reality. This equilibrium, never static but, like reality itself, involved in continuous change, is like that of a tightrope dancer who, by small adjustments, keeps a continuous balance between his being and empty space.“—Sigfried Giedion
Emerging networking infrastructures, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, are challenging how traditional architectural space is perceived, used and produced; creating for many remarkable discontinuities. Jeffrey Huang, an Associate Professor of Architecture at Harvard University, discussed the changes in physical architecture as a result of an increasingly virtual experience of life. For example, bank architecture is disappearing or being re-appropriated for other uses, while online banking is taking its place. Classroom is being partially replaced by the virtual learning environment, retail store by online shopping, prison by electronic surveillance, playground by virtual gaming environment and so on. The implications of new Internet based concepts: cyberspace, virtual communities, and electronic marketplaces on architecture of buildings and vice versa inspire Huang’s research and development of architecture as interface, the goal of which is to create a physical space that is highly decentralized but interconnected.
Huang presented the Swisshouse project, a “radically new kind of consulate” for science and technology, which was conceived in response to the “brain drain” problem of the Swiss government. Its goal is to facilitate knowledge exchange among the Swiss scientific community in the Boston area and academic institutions in Switzerland and other countries, and to provide interdisciplinary interaction among participants from research, education, business, law and politics. The Swisshouse opened its doors in October 10, 2000, and it is located both in the city of Boston, Massachusetts and on the Internet. Jefferey Huang designed the Swisshouse in collaboration with architect Muriel Waldvogel. The project began as a donation by Lombard Odier & Cie, a Swiss private bank, to the Swiss Confederation to mark the bank’s 200th anniversary. The physical site for the project in Boston was a converted, one store building located between two universities that house large numbers of Swiss ex-patriots, MIT and Harvard. The exterior of the building remained barely changed. What turned out to be more significant for the architects is redesigning the interior space of the building and “choreographing connectivity” by creating interfaces between the physical and the virtual worlds. For Huang, the element that provides integrity for the convergent architecture “does not consist of bricks or concrete or columns; it consists of data”. The Internet is also approached as a site for which the building is constructed, thus helping to bridge the gulf between adaptability and integrity.
“Seamless Transition” between the physical and the virtual.
The Swisshouse architecture reflects its function as a physical/virtual construct. The physical building is conceived as a spatial interface, its layout is a motherboard into which one can slide visual modules, or glass walls, that act as projection surfaces. Information devices that establish connections to the virtual world are embedded in the architecture and furniture of the building and become space-defining elements. The senses of perception, acoustic, visual, touch and smell, are deliberately used to enhance the relationships between virtual/physical and public/private environments. The architects also set out to define the boundaries between public, private, as well as semi-public and semi-private spaces, both in the physical site and on the web.
The interior design of the Swisshouse relies on the links created using Web-cams, presence indicators, and various other interfaces. The physical space accommodates the flow of multiple meanings, cultural languages and modes of expression by setting up a number of separate learning environments within the one larger space of the Swisshouse. Translucent materials and projections simulate the merging of disconnected places and languages. Through the use of modular walls, interchangeable lighting systems, and interactive elements, the visual image of the interior of the Swisshouse is a composite of the works of its participants. The space is defined through fragmented information, in the forms of images, sounds, and words. Virtual elements within the Swisshouse also establish surveillance and contain memory.
Public/private. Projection. Simulation.
The Physical Swisshouse is structured to accommodate several knowledge exchange scenarios. The Arena is a trapezoid shape that forms the landscape of the building and becomes a convergence point. Activities that take place here are transmitted in real-time onto the virtual sites via “net-eyes” mounted onto the ceiling. Counterpart to the physical is the Virtual Swisshouse. What is happening physically is apparent on the virtual site, and vice versa. Whenever a visitor logs into the virtual site, a physical icon, “phicon”, starts to move in the physical building. The virtual and physical spaces are complementary, essentially coexistent and interpenetrate despite their distinct qualities.
Attempting to bring into coexistence disconnected environments, the Digital Wall is the physical public element that represents the distant audience. It is composed of three 6’x10’ room-height glass panels with a specially coated film for rear projections. Projections are often used to display live remote events and visually appear to extend the immediate surroundings to include the space that is geographically located thousands of miles away. The space is defined by projection and resembles what Walter Benjamin calls a “Kafkaesque space”, which “in The Trial situates its furthest distances – those spaces that are furthest away from each other – in close contiguity”.
By including a simulated representation of reality within the physical space of the viewer, the Digital Wall recalls Jean Baudrilliard’s “hyper-realism of simulation”, which he describes in relation to media:
“The era of hyper-reality now begins. …what was projected psychologically and mentally, what used to be lived out on earth as metaphor, as mental or metaphorical scene, is henceforth projected into reality, without any metaphor at all, into an absolute space which is also that of simulation”
The ‘hyper’ for Baudrilliard refers to a new condition in which the borderline between reality and illusion has been dissipated in a sort of “obscenity” with no clear difference between an exterior and an interior. Through the Digital Wall, the visitors of the Swisshouse interact with the simulation that blurs distinctions between the physical environments in Boston and in Switzerland, and at the same time the visitors participate in the simulated feeling of one community.
Through the interactivity between real and mediated participants, the projections of the Digital Wall converge both space and time and allow for the “instantaneity of communication.” They construct one’s perceptions of the “natural” similarly to Tomas Lawson’s photographic images, which “hold reality distant from us” and at the same time “make it seem more immediate, by enabling us to ‘catch the moment’.”
Co-presence. Transparency. Relationship to Other.
When Nicolas, a hypothetical visiting scientist, enters the building and signs in on a laptop in the vestibule, his name and icon appear on the physical and virtual guest-book wall at the entrance. The inhabitants of the physical space as well as the on-line community know immediately of his visit. Nicolas smiles as he sees his icon appear, as it shows him three years younger than he is today. The hyper-reality of being aware of one’s physical presence and the presence of the representation, or an image of oneself, suggests the feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor, according to Benjamin, “the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public.” Entering the Swisshouse then seems like entering the realm of language and establishing oneself in relation to the “others”, through the Lacanian gaze, at the same time recognizing and misrecognizing oneself. According to Lacan, one’s knowledge of the world, of others and of self is determined by language. In the third phase of the “mirror stage” the child, or the scientist entering the Swisshouse, realizes not only that the reflection is an image, but that the image is his/her own and is different form the image of the Other.
Reinforcing Lacan’s theory that the unconscious is constructed like a language, the Knowledge Café is composed of large and long tables that set out to facilitate informal groupings and brainstorming. A small kitchen adjacent to the café is intended to trigger the senses of smell and taste to allow for personal and intimate experiences. Perhaps, this is the place where ideas transmitted through language and learned through the interactive experience within the Swisshouse can be internalized. The Knowledge Café is a semi-private space that can be accessed from the web, but users in the physical site remain in control of the content that is being transmitted.
Divided by frosted glass, Media Spaces remain visually open to the arena, but stay separated acoustically to be used for private conversations. Even though the sound barrier suggests disconnection from the other physical spaces, it is difficult to imagine any notion of privacy in the environment, which is monitored, recorded and transmitted to active and passive participants located in other cities and continents. The principle of transparency, which, for modernists, “renders buildings subjects to space, absorbed and dissolved in it, penetrated from all sides by light and air” , here transcends all notions of inhabiting completely private space that belongs to any one individual. Reviving both social and spatial transparency, modernists evoke the picture of a glass city, its buildings invisible and society open. In the Swisshouse, being continuously “plugged in”, the space is penetrable and exposed to a multitude of societies, cultures, disciplines, points of view, time zones, climates, etc. Transparency effect here relates more to Baudrilliard’s “obscene”, “when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication”
The experience of a scientist within the Swisshouse can be likened to an astronaut within the Space Station. The notion of private space is obliterated for both the astronaut and the scientist, by continuous surveillance and reporting. By participating in a dialogue within a monitored environment, both willingly give up their liberties. But the transparency of communication creates an illusion of being connected. The astronaut, placed on the forefront of research, is the “barer of knowledge”, the spokesperson for the unknown. By televising his experience, he can supposedly connect with his family and colleagues. Similarly, in an attempt to compensate for the ex-patriot’s loss of community, technology within the Swisshouse transmits a spectacle of the scientist’s interaction to a remote audience and creates analogous importance of being in the center of critical dialogue and at the frontier of research.
Knowledge and Power
The semi-transparent physical architecture of the Swisshouse, the “net-eyes” and continuous connection to the Internet, all of which are intended to increase the exchange of knowledge, recall Foucault’s Panoptiocon and his view of the relation between knowledge and power. Foucault argues that knowledge is the power to define others and ceases to be a liberation to become a mode of surveillance, regulation, and discipline. In the circular building of Panopticon, no prisoner can be certain of not being observed from the central watch-tower, and so the prisoners gradually begin to police their own behavior. Foucault’s “disciplinary power” refers to a “system of surveillance which is interiorized to the point that each person is his or her own overseer.” By monitoring the thinking activity of the scientists and making it visible, is it not more efficient and profitable for the Swiss government to exercise control over the ex-patriots, than establishing prohibitions and penalty? In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes that the Panopticon creates subjects responsible for their own subjection. Likewise, the scientists, responding to the acoustic, visual and informational transparency of the Swisshouse, are responsible for self-monitoring their own behavior and discourse, for their “self-enslavement”. Power for Foucaoult is not the property of an individual or class and is not simply a commodity; it has the character of a network, its threads extended everywhere.
The individual within the Swisshouse is like “ a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.” Each Personal Space of the Swisshouse is not a defined space for interaction, but rather just a personalized storage unit, the “corpus”. It is used in the physical environment and has a counterpart in the digital space. Suggesting an extension of the body, the corpus offers a container for personal objects and ideas, but also implies a parallel relationship between the individual and the information devices, which are similarly embedded in the furniture.
In the basement of the physical Swisshouse, hosted by a high-speed computer server, is located the Digital Switzerland – a neutral space in which ideas can flow freely and discussions among distant parties can be held openly. Ideas and expertise are exchanged in the Idea Marketplace, which appropriates the structure of a market, where everyone can contribute and the authorship of content is decentralized. Acting as a knowledge broker, market mechanisms determine which information persists. Knowledge becomes an information commodity that can be manipulated and exchanged. The image of knowledge becomes a dynamic system.
A fragment of visual information within the Swisshouse, the Interactive Wallpaper, is a changing image of memory. While the physical attributes of architecture appear to have no memory, the use of technology makes up for the “loss of memory” by visualizing activity that takes place over time. One of the walls, for example, shows snippets of conversations, which are captured using voice recognition software. Single words slowly fall down towards the floor to form a “residue of thought”. An overt microphone hangs low in the center of the room, so that participants are aware of being at the same time performers and activators of the wallpaper. In this way, the architecture of the building incorporates the viewer not only to complete the work of art, but “to initiate it and give it content”.
Conclusive questions: Public gathering. Phantasmagoria. Distraction
In his article “Future Space”, Huang refers to city plazas as “street theaters”, where people gather to watch others, to stroll and browse, to participate in a multitude of social interactions – chance meetings, brief chats, leisurely conversations. The visitors to the Swisshouse gather physically and digitally, in person and in image. So, what kind of public space is created between the “great screens on which are reflected atoms, particles, and molecules in motion?” According to Baudrilliard, it would not be a “true public space”, but rather consist of “gigantic spaces of circulation, ventilation and ephemeral connections”.
Perhaps the hyper-reality within the Swisshouse provides an environment similar to that of a video game, but extends it into the physical space. When we observe someone play an interactive game, we notice the player’s complete abandon of the surrounding reality in exchange for total concentration and participation on the screen. The Swisshouse attempts to reconcile a contradiction between the illusory nature of the images and the physical architecture, by creating a meta-virtual reality. But now the visitors to the Swisshouse experience a “conflict between rational belief and sensual experience” not unlike the visitors to the Phantasmagoria shows in the 19th century, the exhibitions of optical illusions produced by means of the magic lantern. Phantasmagoria spectacles pursued a process of sustaining illusions and creating the “absolute reality of the unreal”, based on the manipulation and the uncertainty of the senses. The interior ‘play space’ of the Swisshouse is similarly defined by the visual stimuli of projected images.
I wonder if the fractured montage of the mediated environment of the Swisshouse does not contribute to what Benjamin refers to as the distracted state of mind of the urban dweller? Benjamin differentiates between tactile and optical perception, one in which participants experience a space by usage and touch, the other by perception. Do the visitors to the Swisshouse, being in a state of continuous participation and activity, experience absentmindedness and distraction? Do transparency and simulation disperse their concentration? Is there a possibility that “too great a proximity of everything” reveals a condition of schizophrenic openness and a state of confusion?
Bibliography
1.Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space. Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 200
In this book, Vidler offers an in-depth analysis of the relationships between the psychological conditions and urban architecture today. Some of the topics are particularly relevant to the discussion of the Swisshouse: proximity of near and distant realities, transparency in architecture, tactile and optical perception of space, as well as the state of distraction that renders the cities “invisible”.
2.www.linezine.com/4.1/features/jhmwsh.htm , April 20, 2005
This online article contains visual images documenting the Swisshouse, links to Huang’s page on convergent architecture, as well as links to the articles that served as resources for the project. It is also significant that the article is located on the Internet, which is a site for the project itself.
3.Sarup, Madan. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism. Essex, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf Pearson Education Limited, 1988, 1993
This is a comprehensive discussion of the work of key philosophers and writers of the post-structuralism and postmodernism. The writings of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault in particular, help trace the influences of the postmodernist thought on the Swisshouse project.
4.Huang, Jeffrey. “Future Space. A New Blueprint for Business Architecture.” Harvard Business Review (April 2001): 149-158
Written by the author of the project, the article is a great resource describing the details in relationships between Huang’s ideas for the Swisshouse and their manifestations in the finished project. Huang describes the influences that formed some of the key design elements in the convergent architecture of the Swisshouse as well as some of the limitations of the architecture on the Internet.
5.Rush, Michael. New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 1999
As a history of new media, Rush places virtual reality within the context of the moving image, video, installation, performance and manipulated photography. Particularly, the discussion of interactivity and relationship of time and space on the Internet informs the discussion of the interactive environment of the Swisshouse.
6.Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Particularly important for the discussion of the Swisshouse is Benjamin’s detailed discussion about the relationship between painting and film, the magician and the surgeon and the extent to which the mechanical equipment has penetrated into reality.
7.Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic, Foster
Baudrilliard’s “obsenity of the visible” and the changes in perception of public and private space, as well as the influences of the spectacle and transparency, provide significant context for the discussion of the meta-virtual environment of the Swisshouse.
8.Lawson, Thomas, “Last Exit: Painting.” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis
The role of the camera capturing the moment and the implications of the “more immediate” reality illuminate the possible social connotations of the public space created with the live video projections in the Swisshouse.
9.Gunning, Tom. “Illusions Past and Future: The Phantasmagoria and its Specters”
This overview of the optical theater of Phantasmagoria presents a historical context for the use of projections, video and spectacle in contemporary art and offers a dialogue on the influences of environments created through optical illusion on human behavior.