Transient Boundaries between Realities

Thoughts on Contemporary Culture and the Future of Architecture

“Art in general and, naturally, architecture, is a reflection of the spiritual condition of man at a particular time”. (Manifesto de la Arquitectura Emocional, Mathias Goeritz, 1953)

Following this idea and other examples throughout history (from the Vitruvian Man to Le-Corbusier’s Modulor, the Green Man, and the Cyborg etc.), contemporary culture, the characteristics of the contemporary subject and its relations to space and place, can tell us much about contemporary architecture. This short paper offers one perspective into the relations between man-culture-architecture nowadays, through the examination of parallel virtual realities, and suggests more questions than answers.

Taken nearly for granted, virtual layers of reality are integral parts (to various extents) in the lives of most of us. Whether it is just an e-mail address, smart-phones’ apps, a Facebook account, or even things we are not aware of – we all have a share in a Cloud. The first question to be asked is how these “two worlds” influence and shape each other and what types of boundaries exist between them. Concepts like identity, community, place, world, traffic, window, storage, travel etc., which originated in the conceptual framework of the physical world, were reinvented and profoundly extended in the virtual world; to such a high level that they gained new meaning that reflect back and reshape the “real” world.

The most explicit and extreme example to the study of transient boundaries between different realities is “Second Life” virtual world, which reveals a complex relationship between the virtual and the “real”. According to Julian Voloj[1], “a virtual world is a three-dimensional web simulation, a kind of virtual community in which people interact with each other through self-created virtual alter egos; so called ‘avatars’, who communicate with each other via ‘instant-messaging’”. According to Second Life’s Facebook page, this is a ‘world where you can be whoever you'd like and build and sell whatever you can imagine’. This platform has many sociological and cultural aspects, but the reason I find this example so interesting is the fact that SL offers an entire parallel world, way beyond other social networks, that echoes back to our physical reality and can tell us much about it and where it is heading.

Here are some facts. SL’s basic infrastructure is the grid. The entire grid reaches a total area of 72×109 km2, roughly 140 times the Earth's surface area, and supports more than 1012 regions (the basic component of the grid). As for April 2011, 2,059.86 km2 of this area was allocated to 31431 actual regions, creating almost the size of the country of Luxembourg. On this grid avatars can purchase or rent “land” to create and design different places with different themes and layers of content, and establish a shared community around them (often realized in common events, discussions, games and other activities; many times translated to “real” life). SL even has its own currency, Linden-Dollars (L$), allowing its ‘residents’ to exchange different goods among a broad range of services. But it is far from being an enclosed environment, and the Linden-Dollar is a prominent example for that, since it can be exchanged to “real” money such as US dollars or other currencies, on market-based currency exchanges.

With your self-created avatar you can travel this world by “foot”, by flying, through vehicles or instant teleportation to explore the different places it offers. Among some fantastic and imaginary places[2] we find a vast collection of replicas of “real” places and familiar typologies; programs such as schools, museums, retail, religious institutions, bars and cafés, working places, private homes, streets and roads, castles, gardens, music halls, and even branches of “real” embassies and political parties. SL is a hybrid world, both the ego and the alter ego of the real world – an exaggerated expression of it, a festival of human ideas, dreams and desires. Taking Second Life as one example out of many existing virtual worlds as such, and other expressions of real/virtual realities in forms of different social networks - they all share a common denominator, as they are all extensions of man: of us, our cultures, subcultures, and our world in general.

Glimps of Second Life places (SL destination guide: http://secondlife.com/destinations/)

But beyond what might seem as a gimmick, lays a serious question about the types of architectural mutations that emerge during the bidirectional crossings of the transient boundaries between different realities. A window for example, both as a concept and as an object (or a subtraction from an object), has many more meanings today than simply a hole in a wall. When the original meaning of the term ‘window’ will burnout, or will be referred mainly to its other (virtual) interpretations, it is likely that architectural mutations such as a house without windows will occur in the “real” world.

Another question arises while discussing places, landscapes and architecture in the same category as people, communities and culture, and it is whether architecture can also have ‘second life’. When I was about to create a Facebook account for the Empire State Building, as an experiment for this particular paper, I found out that it is already exist. It is true that it is not exactly the format I had in mind, but the fact that it has 551,862 likes, 21,813 talking about it and 1,113,417 Facebook holders mentioned they were there, is quite interesting. On this page people share photos of themselves and the building, practical questions regarding schedule, events and other ‘interesting’ facts. The building itself shares its own photos in different poses and different light settings, reveals its intimate interiors, moods and events. Not only that the building, as we say in architecture forums, “has a life of its own”, but it also has a second life of its own.

>> Spotlight Dress (unknown designer) >> The Empire State Building show — >> Spotlight Dress (unknown designer)
>> The Empire State Building show

Which of these ‘lives’ is more influential? It is not a new thing that buildings, usually famous ones, are being experienced mostly through their photographs, renders and drawings; as much as it is not new that architects in many cases invest more in the appearance of buildings and their facades than in the quality of the interiors; but following the shift of the cultural-gravity-force to the virtual world of the Cloud, this phenomenon is increasing dramatically, in a way that the gap between the image of architecture and the actual lived architecture is wider than ever before. From this perspective, it seems that there is a decrease in the quality of “real” architecture in an unbalanced ratio relatively to the image of architecture and architects throughout the media; but maybe “real” places and “real” architecture are no longer as important as they were. If we’ll go back for a moment to Second Life and to the not-yet-realized potential of the virtual extensions of man and the universe – what is, or better to ask what will be, the actual need for physical environment? Screens are already the hearth of our physical environments. But I would like to believe, as an architect of the “real” world, that as much as this perspective describes the end of (real) place, it can also be seen as a phase towards a mutual relationship between these parallel realities, meaning – between the “real” and the perception of it, its image and database. History shows that the objection from a traditional-conservative point of view, cannot really stop inevitable shifts in culture, and as the common phrase puts it “if you can’t beat them – join them”. How should architecture respond to these tendencies is maybe the most important question in the contemporary discourse, but understanding these tendencies and the way they are embedded in our visual perceptions and practices is an essential step along this quest.

<< Jonathan Marquis, Wilderspiel, 2013, explores the idea of inner and outer wilderness. >> Raimund Abraham, House Without Rooms, 1974 — << Jonathan Marquis, Wilderspiel, 2013, explores the idea of inner and outer wilderness.
>> Raimund Abraham, House Without Rooms, 1974

[1] Julian Voloj, Virtual Jewish Topographies – The Genesis of Jewish (Second) Life, in: Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, Ashgate Publishing Company, Hampshire, 2008.

[2] Second Life destination guide http://secondlife.com/destinations/

Thoughts about the Contemporary Subject

The One is extended, multiplied, duplicated.
It has copies of itself, different forms of partially-abstract identities “living” in partially-abstract worlds.
In these parallel worlds, these identities allow the extension of the One’s mind, by enabling different processes and calculations that its mind itself is not capable of.
They also allow the extension of its actions, enabling it to perform and act without any physical presence in a particular place at a particular time.
The One follows its own time and it has no necessity to synchronize with another One at the same space or the same time in order to interact – One can act now (in what seems to be immediate and direct) with another One that can react anytime later without spoiling the sense of “immediacy”.
The One is no longer connected to a hard environment or to a hard identity (place, family, history).
The One lives in a soft environment: connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting - without any obligations or commitments - to infinite number of soft communities.
In the soft (liquid) world, the One can change its identity endlessly as if everything around is a customs-stand.
It has no engagement to any social or physical norms, or any pre self-definition or preference - infinite freedom (!).

They are transient manifestations, always on the go, searching constantly for meaning and identity without any particular point of reference.
In this manner, the Ones are all nomads in a partially smooth/ partially striated space – hybrid space.
The instantaneous experience of all its daily actions neutralizes space and creates a so-called direct experience: immediate relation between action and reaction.
In these instant processes there is no importance to all the phases in between.
The One no longer experiences or has the necessity to experience the physical world.
The extensions of the One made it larger relatively to its physical world.
Shrinking time by reducing physical presence and abridging space – the One became everything simultaneously: an organism, an operator, an environment. It is in fact its own environment.
But also, it can no longer just be. It is constantly doing– it will not call his mother to be in silence.
Relationships are reduced to actions only – active signals.
The meaning of just being is gone.
The world of the Ones is the world of indirectness, of reflections and simulacrum – nothing is permanent, nothing is direct.
It is a world of mirrors.

Cyborgs, Shells, Animals, Machines, Environments

Space travel challenges mankind not only technologically but also spiritually, in that it invites man to take an active part in his own biological evolution. Scientific advances of the future may thus be utilized to permit man’s existence in environments which differ radically from those provided by nature as we know it.[1]

Any environment other than which we are capable of living in (outer space, deep water, or even on earth at extreme weather conditions) requires biological changes in our bodies. Technological devices, vehicles and artificial atmospheres encapsulated in some sort of enclosure, are not only unsustainable but can also be dangerous like a “fish taking a small quantity of water along with him to live on land”[2]. Instead of insisting on carrying his whole environment along with him, man can attempts partial adaptation to extreme conditions. For the “exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments”[3], Clynes and Kline propose the term Cyborg. “The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel”[4]; releasing him from being a slave to the machine.

The discourse of the cyborg seems promising not only as means for the conquest of new territories differ than our natural environments, but mainly because it describes well (definitely as a metaphor but also in reality) our contemporary culture and its possible future directions. The idea of the cyborg permeates our lives from physical transplants through the eccentric to information systems, texts and ergonomically designed apparatuses. According to Donna Haraway, a cyborg is a hybrid creature, composed of organism and machine, “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”[5]. And as she later expands her definition to cyborg-culture[6], is not as much about hybrid-humans as it is about their relationships with their Companion Species – animals and machines.

Proposition for redesigning of the human epidermis

Anthony Vidler implies this term to architecture as he offers a new home, home for cyborgs, that unlike “the promise of the house as a bubble container that frees human contents from the vicissitudes of external environment”[7]; the home for cyborgs is about the interstices of the differences between the organism and the machine. Opposed to the artificial environments perpetuating the distinction between nature and culture and between the organic and the inorganic - the home for cyborgs can be conceived as “prosthesis and prophylactic”[8].

William Mitchell claims in this discourse that “our buildings will become less like protozoa and more like us’ and we will ‘increasingly think of them as robots for living in”[9]. If to elaborate on this, maybe we won’t even need robots to live in as we will become our own environments, one with nature and technology. If the Cyborgs discourse suggests the revocation of categorical binaries between society and nature; human and animal; domesticated and wild, and claiming that they are intellectually and politically moribund – it redefines the meaning of being human. Maybe it suggests that being human is actually being everything simultaneously – organisms, machines, environments. So what will really be the role of the home in our future culture, the role of space and the meaning of place?

Fritz Kahn, the Man as an Industrial Palace, 1926

[1] Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, Cyborgs and space, Astronautics, (September 1960)
[2] ID.
[3] ID.
[4] ID.
[5] Haraway, Donna, A Manifesto for Cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980’s, Socialist Review, No.80 (1985).
[6] Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the renovation of nature, Routledge, New York (1991).
[7] Vidler, Anthony, Home for Cyborgs, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (1992).
[8] ID.
[9] Mitchell, William J.: E-topia: Urban life, Jim — but not as we know it, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (1999).

Scale in Transience

The first question to be asked regarding scale in transience is whether the world is getting bigger or smaller. This question is complicated, because the answer would probably be ‘both’, as these two processes can be seen as parallel, sequential or even circular. The second question would be who (or what) is moving, and if this “unit” by itself is getting bigger or smaller. But transience in relation to scale not only raises the question of what is moving, but also how far and how fast; and how all of these factors influence or affected by the dynamic relationship of time and space.

Take 1

Zygmunt Bauman in his essay Time and space reunited suggests a fascinating perspective on the relationship between time and space that has changed dramatically from what he calls “heavy modernity” to “light modernity”. According to him “the appearance of vehicles quicker than human or animal legs could ever be and the fact that vehicles, unlike humans or animals, could be made quicker and quicker” [1], changed our whole perspective and use of time and space. “Time became something humans could invent, build, appropriate, use and control – time became a question independent of inert and immutable dimensions of land masses or seas. Time was different from space because, unlike space, it could be changed and manipulated – and most importantly, made shorter, less costly, and so more productive.”[2]

In that era, which he defines as the age of hardware or heavy modernity, territorial conquest was an obsession. “Adventure and happiness, wealth and might were geographical concepts or ‘landed properties’ – tied to the place and immovable”[3]. They grew with the territorial size and the ability to protect and control its boundaries. Territory was to achieve by faster machines, or in other words, “accelerating time was the only means of enlarging space”[4]. Space was the value, time was the tool, and so the modern civilization has “focused on filling the space with objects more densely and expanding the space that could be so filled in a given time”[5]. The ability to protect and manage the territory was to achieve first through “the image of the map, closely guarded and tightly controlled”[6], but as Bauman puts it, “Space was truly possessed when controlled – and control meant, first and foremost, time coordination”[7].

While referring to General Motors’ ‘Willow Run’ plant in Michigan , Bauman says that “the logic of power and the logic of control were combined with the logic of the boundary separating the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’; once blended in one; they were embodied in the logic of size, organized around one precept: bigger is more efficient. In heavy modernity, progress meant big size and spatial expansion”[8], though, enlargement and the accumulation of space was their strength as much as it was their weakness, “their hotbed, their fortress and their prison”[9].

“After 68 years of arming the nation and putting America on wheels, the Willow Run manufacturing plant in southeast Michigan closed on Thursday. The 5-million-square-foot powertrain plant, owned by Motors Liquidation Corp. (Autoweek, Laure… — “After 68 years of arming the nation and putting America on wheels, the Willow Run manufacturing plant in southeast Michigan closed on Thursday. The 5-million-square-foot powertrain plant, owned by Motors Liquidation Corp. (Autoweek, Lauren Abdel-Razzaq on 12/24/2010)

That part of history, as Bauman claims, is now coming to its end with the advent of software capitalism and light modernity, as oppose to hardware and heavy modernity. In the software universe space can be traversed, literally, in ‘no time’ while the meaning of distance is cancelled. Furthermore, “there is no time-distance separating the end from the beginning; the two notions used to plot the passing have lost their meaning. There are only ‘moments’: points without dimensions… If all parts of space can be reached at any moment, there is no reason to reach any of them at any particular moment and no reason to worry about securing the right of access to any”[10]. Therefore, space counts little, or does not count at all. In the software era “bulkiness and size are no longer an advantage… buoyancy is the most profitable and the most cherished asset… The managerial equivalent of liposuction has become the leading stratagem of managerial art: slimming, downsizing, phasing out, closing down or selling off…”[11]

What’s important to emphasize in this perspective is that both trends of upscaling and downscaling are not at all sequential as it might have been understood so far - the software era does not neutralizes bigness, it offers a new form of it: “The downsizing obsession is, as it happens, an un-detachable complement of the merger mania… Merger and downsizing are not at cross-purposes; on the contrary, they condition each other, support and reinforce… It is the blend of merger and downsizing strategies that offers capital and financial power space to move and move quickly, making it ever more global – while at the same time depriving labor of its bargaining power, immobilizing it and tying its hands ever more firmly”.[12]

World map of mega-cities: the components are getting larger while the variety is actually shrinking. From http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/?p=1590 — World map of mega-cities: the components are getting larger while the variety is actually shrinking. From http://www.viewsoftheworld.net/?p=1590

Take 2

The development of flying machines allowed humanity to view the earth from above. While this ability has been significantly influential on the human perception of the world and its great scale, looking at a segment of the globe from above still just “mimics the traditional angle of vision of the human eye – the view remains connected to the viewing subject… stayed tied to the earth”[13] as a reference surface. The great shift in the human perception occurred with the ability of gazing at the entire globe from outer space, looking back on it from a distance rather than looking down. While the height of the former viewpoint is measurable regarding to the base surface together with gravity and a “clear sense of above and below”[14], “the loss of this grounded dimension in gravity-free outer space means that height morphs into mere distance between objects”[15].

My take on the Whole Earth Catalog concept of mapping the entire planet for the sake of humanity, ecology and sustainability – but also as means of control: redefining the boundaries just on a larger scale. — My take on the *Whole Earth Catalog* concept of mapping the entire planet for the sake of humanity, ecology and sustainability – but also as means of control: redefining the boundaries just on a larger scale.

This symbolic image of the earth encountered humans with a new sense of scale - on one hand, through the difficulty of locating oneself in the bigness of the entire planet and the universe it is floating in; while on the other hand, the earth was shown in its fragility and smallness, which gave man the sense of power, of the ability to influence, manage and control – suddenly, man himself became larger, relatively to earth.

The ability to see not just parts of the globe but the globe as a whole and the rising sense of ‘we are all in the same boat’, have undermined the corporeal segmentation of the planet and suggested its deterritorialization.

Nevertheless, at the same time, the earth became a territory of its own, with boundaries clearer than ever before, that had to be controlled and managed ‘properly’ for the sake of ‘ecology and sustainability’. Discovering outer space can be seen as the beginning of a new era, although I would claim it to be the peak of an old era, the era of territorial obsession - when power was to achieve through a territory shaped out in the image of the map, closely guarded and tightly controlled.

This expansion of human experience was followed by varied attempts to grasp the new universe by scaling it down – examples are ranging from geodesic domes to “all included” dwelling units to playful globe-balloons and more.

One of the interesting attempts was the establishment of Drop City, an artists' community that formed in southern Colorado in 1965 that became known as the first rural "hippie commune", and as the offspring of the global sustainability movement.

As much as they advocated nomadism and challenged zoning regulations and political boundaries, their most important publications, edited in the Whole Earth Catalog [16] (1968-1972), demonstrates both the dominance of the symbolic form of earth, and the desire to map, define, divide and classify every inch of the planet. While the hippies of Drop City were actually looking for a territory open to intrusion and to the redrawing of boundaries and the maps, they presented a project that advanced the opposite, just on a larger scale.

Take 3

Europe’s shifting basic “units” throughout the history also demonstrate the tension or dependence between the different scales: from the Greek polis (as an example to start with) accumulated to the form of state, to the expansion of the great empires and the global colonization; then back to the form of state, and recently (with the formation of the European Union) the somewhat return to the form of the ‘polis’, just in its larger version – the mega-polis. Moreover, the explosion of scale comes with the counter reaction of implosion: While its physical, cultural and social boundaries currently blurs and it becomes governed by one political and economic system – Europe is flooded with wondering individuals, numerous and varied communities of immigrants, roaming languages and dialects… it’s going through parallel processes of explosion and implosion. Europe is a tangible example but these processes occur also on a global scale - the globalization on one hand, and the rising dominance of the individual as the basic “atom”, on the other.

What I find important to conclude in this discussion is not the awareness of the existence of these new scales but the distance between them. Referring back to the loss of the grounded dimension in outer space that means that “height morphs into mere distance between objects”[17] (take 2), and that “there is no time-distance separating the end from the beginning; the two notions… have lost their meaning”, as Bauman argues, to a point that “there are now only ‘moments’: points without dimensions”[18] (take 1) – I wonder about the nature of the relationship evolving between ‘the individual’ and ‘the whole world’. Who is moving? Who has the freedom to move? How far and how fast? And above all – what are the boundaries? Has nomadism lost its classic form? Does transience conclude to Google Earth?

To be continued…

[1] Zygmunt Bauman, Time and space reunited, Time and Society, 9/2-3, 2000
[2] ID.
[3] ID.
[4] ID.
[5] ID.
[6] ID.
[7] ID.
[8] ID.
[9] ID.
[10] ID.
[11] ID.
[12] ID.
[13] Volker M. Welter, From Disc to Sphere, in: Cabinet Quarterly Magazine of Art and Culture, 2011: 40, pp. 19-25
[14] ID.
[15] ID.
[16] Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1968- 1972.
[17] Volker M. Welter, From Disc to Sphere, in: Cabinet Quarterly Magazine of Art and Culture, 2011: 40, pp. 19-25
[18] Zygmunt Bauman, Time and space reunited, Time and Society, 9/2-3, 2000

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