Facades are the medium of the public space UNDERSTANDING FACADES The context
Our age is referred to as the age of the third industrial revolution, of globalization, of hyper-capital-
ism, of deregulation, virtualization and individualization, or the age of the post modern. These labels for our times are associated with the development of advanced telecommunication and information
technologies. We are experiencing fundamental changes within every aspect of our lives: in individual and public domains, within political and economic arenas, as well as within both cultural and environmental spheres. Space, in all its aspects (landscapes, cities, places and bodies) is undergoing dramatic changes, too. This goes along with the increasing abstraction and virtualization of space as well with its production and consumption on a hitherto unknown scale. However, while we feel as if
we are surrendering to the forces that cause these new conditions of space, the relevance of space as an area of comprehension, investigation and action, seems widely underestimated, undervalued
and disregarded. Space becomes marginalized as the other, which is conquested, commodified and utilized, but not conceptualized by the mainstream of contemporary investigation.
This essay is an attempt to reconsider the current public space design tenets that lead to the underestimated conditions of space. Its goal is to open up and introduce new perspectives on the way
public space’s context - or the physical borders of the public space – is related to the public life on, especially, public squares in dense commercial city centers. This elaboration seeks to contribute to a new understanding of commercial city layers in the public realms. It strives to re-contextualize and
re-conceptualize this layer of the city in order to raise a critical conscience about the relation between
public life and its borders and in order to develop a set of implications for spatial disciplines. This essay is composed with an underlying - but very crucial - plane of media theory.
I will deploy a framework of the theory supported and substantiated by Marshall McLuhan. This essay will chiefly be immersed in the relation between the (‘hot vs. cool’) media theory (McLuhan) and the physical public space. This thread is also supported by the critical notions on spatial planning
from Jane Jacobs, and will evolve as the most important area of investigation. The last theorist will
not influence the purpose of this essay, but Jane Jacobs made me reconsider the function of the performance of cities. This was the take-off to deepen my thoughts onto this subject. Because Jane
Jacobs wrote that cities are economic entities. And that the very nature of economic activity governs the shape of the city – the size of the buildings and houses, their numbers, the materials with
which they are constructed. It also affects the quality, quantity and maintenance of the “spaces in
between” – the roads, parks, and public places that punctuate the urban landscape. When you walk
around your city, try to identify the various ways in which the physical structure of the city reflects
economic influences and decision-making – the allocation (or lack thereof) of resources to construction projects, the presence (or absence) of public amenities, the scale and ornamentation of civic structures, the health of local commercial districts. Jane Jacobs called my attention to many of these issues, and helped me think about what the economy has to do with the creation or lack of vibrant cities.
The combination of the two theories and lines of thought are crucial in finding a new concept for the public space of the commercial city layer.
In order to set out a framework I will first present the ‘spatialities’ of the public realm and its homogenization, polarization and fragmentation. Because these developments transform public space in
dramatic proportions and at a far faster rate than our bodies and minds can handle, thereupon we develop a crisis of orientation. My investigation should clarify the way of how we perceive the public realm through our five senses and as we re-act according to the cognitive images we develop.
The situation
The medium large cities – in the Western world – are the very manifestation of the output of the commercial and service based economy. City centers are, sequentially, intriguing strongholds of the
public’s circulation as well as the varied functions these centers are housing, according to the attributes of this economy. They are also a victim of this industrial ‘quality’ which occurs in each other
developed country. By victims I mean the eroded structures that have lost part of their identity to the commercial sepsis. This notion of sepsis is an interpretation or metaphor that Richard Sennett
(1994) previously had singled out as the significant parallel between the medical discovery of blood circulation in the 17th century and the emergence a new urban model. The image of the fluidity of blood pumped around the human body by the heart, as described by the English physician William
Harvey (1578–1657), is at the root of the type of social organism that inaugurated the discipline of sociology and public. Each structure – assailed by commerce - in the city centre is no longer the outpost – or organ if you will - for their own function and identity. Physically speaking I mean that by
commercial acquisition of a building in a city center, the first floor and the façade are passed on to the new identity designs of the (temporal) function it will house. One can say it is getting a second skin. By repeating this process along a strip of individual buildings you will get an incoherent combination
and polarization of facades. This diversity derives from the intention of the shop owners. This idea
of the continuous line of different approaches of commercializing the facades is also homogenizing the city’s landscape. The facades become a tool of marketing and identity transfer onto the public
realm. This process has significant consequences for the public realm, because this marketing has to attract the roaming public in the public space. Therefore each shop is exposing their identity as
clear as possible onto the place where the public will see it the best. Overall, this way of dealing with facades is creating a commercial city layer, which is strongly negotiating with the ‘innocent’ public. In the end it will evolve in a crisis of orientation. The way public is acting in public space within this
commercial city layer as its frame, is not often – rather well never – associated with a media theory such as Marshall McLuhan is constituting in his work.
The concept
McLuhan developed his notion of “The Medium is the Message” through his consideration of the effects of technology and different forms of media on human communication and behavior. It was
a way for him to explore the impact of technologies and media independent of their content and represented a new way of understanding the effects of media and technology that differed from the
content analysis approach that dominated the pre-Innis/McLuhan study of communications and
technology. Like most good aphorisms, McLuhan’s famous dictum has more than one meaning. One meaning is the notion that, independent of its content or messages, a medium has its own intrinsic effects on our psyches, our associations and our actions, which are its unique message.
The message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. The effects of a medium impose a
new environment and set of sensibilities upon its users. This notion permeates into several other theories developments such as ‘remediation’ and ‘hot vs. cool’. The last one is the crucial concept
from which I will depart my investigation. McLuhan is using this concept as descriptive notions as well as strategic notions.
In order to make a clear window of reasoning for this investigation towards a relation between public life and the commercial city layer, I will elaborate on this concept of hot vs. cool in advance.
Hot vs. cool
This concept is based on the idea of sending and receiving/perceiving a certain sensible message
or intimation. A medium is the information carrier that travels between the sender and the receiver. This is, for in my case, the basic outline that Marshall McLuhan created his theoretical framework
around. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a
communication theorist. McLuhan’s work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan is known for the expressions “the medium is the message” and “global village”.
McLuhan was a fixture in media discourse from the late 1960’s to his death and he continues to
be an influential and controversial figure. More than ten years after his death he was named the “patron saint” of
Wired magazine. McLuhan’s most widely known work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), is a pioneering study in media theory. In it McLuhan proposed that media themselves, not the content they carry, should
be the focus of study—popularly quoted as ‘the medium
is the message’. McLuhan’s insight was that a medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of
the medium itself. In the second chapter of his book he leads off with hot and cool (or cold) media. He makes a
distinction between the two and informs us how to recog-
Portrait of Marshall McLuhan
nize one from the other. The fundamental maxim… (next page)
“There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one
single sense in ‘high definition’. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph
is, visually, ‘high definition’. A cartoon is ‘low definition’, simply because very little visual information is
provided. Telephone is a cool medium. Or of low definition, because the ear is give a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high
in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964)
In terms of the theme of media hot and cool, backward countries are cool, and we are hot. The ‘city
slicker’ is hot, and the rustic is cool. More and more we turn from the content of messages to study
total effects. Kenneth Boulding put this matter in ‘The Image’ by saying: “The meaning of a message is the change which ‘I’, produces the image.” Concern with effect, rather than meaning is a basic
change of our (electric) time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level informa-
tion movement. Next to the above stated distinction, there is a more nuanced layer to these rather straightforward types of explanation. Because it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool culture. McLuhan describes that, for example, a hot radio medium that is used in cool or non-literate cultures has a violent effect, quite unlike its effect, in England or America (hot
cultures), where radio is felt as entertainment. On the other hand a cool culture will have problems coping with the hot media, and will not accept media like movies or radio as entertainment.
In short, hot media mobilizes desires, cool media seduce and overheated media fascinate. With hot
media the public directly understands the meaning, purpose and the reaction it provokes. On the
other hand the power of cool media stands by the enigmatic property, the visual will make sense after
the (personal) deployment of imagination. There it surpasses the hot media, because they are fairly meaningless. But that can also be its power, because – like Arjen Mulder says in ‘Over mediatheorie’
(NL) – ‘the nonsensical is irresistible in every way’. Overheated media are like hot media, but overheated media subsequently tend to increase the hypnotic effect on the receiver. This derives from the fact that hot or overheated media address chiefly one sense.
In a way this concept is a method of thinking through the visual, a notion coined by Sarat Maharaj.
With it Sarat Maharaj is referring to the mode of knowing that is not based on the systematic rigor of science. In my case and perception, where I connect the visual and sensible notion of media to the
physical public space, thinking through the visual should be transformed in ‘acting through the sensible/visual’. Here it is no longer a mode of knowing but a mode of the public using the public space
according to what they perceive while being present in that type of space. Therefore ‘acting’ is the procedure of using the public space that comes from the effect of the ‘visual’ surrounding. One must
not read the word ‘acting’ as a conscious proceeding of the public in the city. Environments are not experienced as conscious as watching a dance performance on stage for example. Hence the subtle approach towards the environment of the public space is a stipulation when it comes to transmogrify
the facades. Instead a unconsciously neglect arises and is supported by the notion of ‘dérive’, coined
by Guy Debord, describes this unconsciously neglect to the utmost extent. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one
might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psycho-geographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard,
ecological science, despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psycho-geography with abundant data.
The main purpose for me to introduce the ‘media’ concept into my essay is this relation between
the visual and the act. The theory and concept in itself is describing perfectly what media can do to movement and behavior. But until now (in my essay) this concept was in a descriptive mode, but
the notions of hot and cool are also strategic notions. These strategies of media are used in many ways, an interesting example is written by media theorist and essayist Arjen Mulder. He describes
the distinction between the uses of ‘temperature’ of the media in the religious domains. The reformation, where the Protestant church separated itself from the Catholic, was a dramatically information reduction for the Protestants. From that moment the vicar preaches: there is nothing (attractive) to
see. This is actually starting up the imagination of the followers, because less information means more imagination. Hence the Protestant church is cool. The Catholic church has the device: long for redemption but don’t imagine anything. There is also a discrepancy between their visuals, on the one
hand you have ‘the word’ (Protestant) and on the other hand you have the image (Catholic). This
example of the strategically embedded hot or cool concepts is one of many other grand changes
peoples’ lives. It is therefore reasonable to say that information reduction is the key to all great cultural revolutions.
Although there are many examples and layers to the hot and cool media, which McLuhan and Mulder
are referring to in their books, there are no examples that are specifically linked with the physical public space and the way it is used. It’s not only because the writers didn’t declaim and mention
them, but because there is no submitted link between the disciplines of the media theory and urban design yet.
In the next chapters I will push both ends of disciplines towards each other in order to achieve my previously stated goal.
The application
“A facade or façade (pronounced /fəˈsɑːd/) is generally one side of the exterior of a building, especially the front, but also sometimes the sides and rear. The word comes from the French language, literally meaning “frontage” or “face”.
In architecture, the facade of a building is often the most important from a design standpoint, as it
sets the tone for the rest of the building. Many facades are historic, and local zoning regulations or other laws greatly restrict or even forbid their alteration.” (Wikipedia)
After reading this essay you will agree it is not only architecture by itself where facades are important, because facades are also playing a major role in the public space.
The key to successfully reconsider and redirect the public space design tenets is to acknowledge the issue at hand and understand the transformed principles from the media theory. And to stay in
close accordance with the hot and cool theory I introduce image manipulating tools that can be implemented as design principles in the spatial discipline of public space design.
Currently there is a tendency to design urban fabrics according to volumes (related to economically
separated zones). These building blocks are the primary concern in urbanism and public space is
second. Receiving less attention, the public spaces become gaps in the urban fabric and voids in the cities. An underlying motive for this essay and my design project is to (re)connect the public space with these volumes, by making them interdependent.
Underneath hot and cool media are layers of different types of images and ‘perceivables’. There is
the traditional image, the photographic image and the post-photographic one. Each has different characteristics and adherents, the traditional image - for example - is the image which one has to
learn to ‘read’. You need to contemplate rather intensively before one can convert the image into
a meaningful significance. This could be either a cool or a hot image (painting), it depends on the (physical) context of the image and the intention of the image. The photographic is a more obvious
and outspoken type of image. It basically is a literal registration and is principally meaningless. An
image can also be manipulated with the intention to let the public/audience actively perceive the image; here I’m talking about a characteristic of post-photographic images.
In relation to the issue at hand, post-photographic images are the most relevant when it comes to the
influential value of adjusting the facades around the public space. By adjusting an image the creator
of that image can steer the interpretation of its audience. He decides whether a certain amount of information is shown or not. This selection might also be interactive with the audience.
Electronic artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer eminently shows the connection between those two options of steering the interpretation and perception. He develops large-scale interactive installations
in public space, and is usually deploying new technologies and custom-made physical interfaces.
He aims for temporary antimonuments for alien agency. In his project of ‘1000 Platitudes’ (picture 1) he intervenes in the public space by beaming the whole alphabet on the facades of a variety of buildings. All the images of these letters on facades are configured into a photomontage and a video
with 1000 words or expressions. These words are commonly used to promote globalised cities to potential investors, such as ‘open’, ‘modern’, ‘clean’, multicultural’, for example. These products are by all means very interesting, but less relevant than his technique and method.
Via his projector he covers an entire stretch of a facade and links the sight of the viewer to a different perception on
the building. In terms of the hot and cool concepts, this is a
technique with cool images, that you see best from a distance, on a more hot surface. This cools the facade down.
Lozano-Hemmer’s 1000
Platitudes
Lozano-Hemmer’s ‘Body Movies’ is more interactively
based than ‘1000 Platitudes’. That’s because ‘Body Movies’ transforms public space with interactive projections
measuring between 400 and 1,800 square metres. Thousands of photographic portraits, previously taken on the
streets of the host city, are shown using robotically controlled projectors. However the portraits only appear inside
the projected shadows of the passers-by, whose silhou-
ettes can measure between two and twenty-five metres depending on how close or far away they
are from the powerful light sources positioned on the ground. A video surveillance tracking system triggers new portraits when all the existing ones have been revealed, inviting the public to occupy new narratives of representation. This interactive projection is based on Samuel van Hoogstraten’s work ‘The Shadow Dance’ from 1660.
Another example of using the facades as a means
to communicate with the audience in the public space is the design of the in New York settled ar-
chitect Simone Giostra. With his (permanent) design for a media facade (picture 2) in Bejing on the
Xicui Entertainment Center, he provided the city of
Beijing with its first venue dedicated to digital media
art, while offering the most radical example of sustainable technology applied to an entire building’s envelope to date.
Xicui’s opaque box-like commercial building gains
the ability of communicating with its urban environment through a new kind of digital transparency. Its
‘intelligent skin’ interacts with the building interiors
and the outer public spaces using embedded, custom-designed software, transforming the building
facade into a responsive environment for entertainment and public engagement. This is a way of overheating the facade, and again, this public engagement finds itself not close to the facade, but further away from it.
Bejing’s Mediafacade designed
by Simone Goistra
And yet another example of the
‘distant perception’ is the work
of JR. He exhibits freely in the
streets of the world, catching
the attention of people who are
not the museum visitors. His work mixes Art and Act, talks about commitment, freedom, identity and limit. That’s why
JR owns the biggest art gallery
in the world. After he found a Piece of the “Women” project in Paris, by artist JR.
camera in the Paris subway, he did a tour of European Street
Art, tracking the people who
communicate messages via the walls. Then, he started to work on the vertical limits, watching the
people and the passage of life from the forbidden undergrounds and roofs of the capital. JR creates “Pervasive Art” that spreads uninvited on the buildings of the slums around Paris, on the walls in the
Middle-East, on the broken bridges in Africa or the favelas in Brazil. People who often live with the bare minimum discover something absolutely unnecessary. And they don’t just see it, they make it.
Some elderly women become models for a day; some kids turn artists for a week. In that Art scene, there is no stage to separate the actors from the spectators.
In 2008, he embarked for a long international trip for “Women”, a project in which he underlines the dignity of women who are often the targets of conflicts. Of course, it didn’t change the world, but sometimes a single intervention in an unexpected place makes you dream that it could.
Because - like stated in the chapters before – facades are like a canvas on which one can distribute anything on the public space. Since these canvasses have never been blank it is apparent that manipulation is the most relevant action at our disposal. The three examples above are all based on
the ratio in which overheating means public engagement on public space instead of right in front of the plinth of the buildings.
It is a herculean task to literally apply image manipulating techniques permanently onto facade
designs, but the intention and the outcome of a converted architectural technique perform similar effects. One could say it is a matter of choosing which purpose to procure, or like I wrote above, the creator of the (post-photographic) image indicates what his audience is supposed to see. This
resembles to a certain amount of censorship. Generally censorship is the suppression of speech
or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor. In a way this
is reducing every experience, whether it is intense or dull, to a very cool state before the content or expression can be learned or assimilated. McLuhan writes about the censor as a filter to reduce, and sometimes minimize, reactions that are equivalent to the occurrence prior to this reaction.
“The censor protects our central system of values, as it does our physical nervous system by simply cooling off the onset of experience a great deal. This cooling system brings on a lifelong state
of psychic rigor mortis, or of somnambulism, particularly observable in periods of new technology.”
In the end the goal of image – or facade - manipulating should be disrupting the impact of a certain experience. In my ‘urban’ case, this experience is initiated by the message the commercial city layer’s canvas is distributing. The manipulative predicate or quality of post-photographic images is
also seen in other disciplines. That’s because it is experience based information emission. Resemblances are as varied as there are different forms of art, only the associated media are different.
There is – for example – the DJ that ‘plays’ with sound to let the audience arrive at a certain state ecstasy or mood. Here I could’ve presented a vast series of disciplines that are chiefly involved in (image) manipulation, such as Simone Giostra and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and the other mentioned
artists. But that would increase the diffusion of my investigation; instead I want to introduce a more
topic specific paragraph. Therefore my design research project is positioned here as an attempt to open up the practical side of designing according to the media theory.
Titled as a public space aiding design trajectory, the project is heading towards a generation of design-treatments. These treatments or tools emerge from an analysis on globally located public
spaces, that each has their own site-specific properties. It’s a series of public spaces that highlight different values of the context the space is in. There is, for example, Times Square in New York
with its grand scale media filled billboards, Plaza Mayor in Madrid as a square with a continuous arcaded plinth and the old town square of Poznan in Poland. The last one mentioned is enclosed
with peculiar colorful facades. The analysis aims for an understanding of the influence of the different facade designs on the public spaces. The conclusions deriving from this analysis are confirming a certain pattern in how public spaces are addressed by the public. But the superscript question, in
both theory as in practice, remains; which design is causing which particular use of the public space. During the analysis of the different squares came a perspicuous revelation. Two design conditions employ the main reasons for why public space users are either intensively using the public space, or are unconsciously neglecting it.
It’s either heating up the facade or the public space floor.
The practice
This essay ends with this chapter that leaps towards the practical part of hot vs. cool. This essay
therefor contextualizes the design project. It gives insight towards designing with the theory’s tools and the interoperable design ingredients. In contrary to the described artists and designers above
I attempt to create permanent design tools and interventions, which will be implemented in and accompanied with the current public space design discipline. Altering facades requires understanding
their properties and requirements. The pattern of public use produced by the facades depends on two conditions.
One of the two design conditions is the scale of the alteration of the facade. Whether it will be a second skin in front of the existing structure or an implementation of media technology in the facade, the level of abstraction and physical measurements make all the difference. The other condition
is continuity. Continuity provides the degree of tranquility along the borders of public space. Both conditions are referring to either the facades as to the public space floor. Both are interdependent
and a successful design relies on the synergy of both. In retrospective this means that both planes (facades and public space floor) carry out influence on the behavior of the public, just as media do.
But it simply depends on the forward vision of the human that facades are the most influential elements. Continually constructing upon these design conditions, an urban designer should look at two design approaches in order to re-activate the public space and its users. That’s either heating up (or
overheating) the facade together with cooling down the public space floor or create a hot floor and a tranquil (cool) facade framework around it. In my design trajectory I created a thermometer with ‘temperature specific’ design tools. These tools are based on the two conditions, but also on criteria such as the functions behind the façade, color use and material use when it comes to the facades. For the
public space design criteria dimensions, elevation, connection with the urban fabric and routing are the most important. These criteria initiate a creative process in order to come up with site-specific
design tools. The addressed designers are hereby challenged to use these or similar techniques in order to enhance the value of public space.
This image shows possible design tools when
it comes to altering the facades.
Concluding words
The public’s modus operandi in the public space is generally steered by the route and location of
sidewalks. This essential element not only superintended by the authorities as a safe place to walk,
but also a visual ‘go’ zone. Within the borders (e.g. curbstones) of this zone the pedestrians are free to roam around in. When it comes to squares, the borders like the sidewalk’s – more or less – disappear, but the confinement of the visual zones are getting more important. The public unconsciously
finds its way through the city. This is where the visual ‘power’ or influence of the facades comes in. Because next to the objects placed in the public space (benches, trees, water etc.) facades function
similar to magnets. The strength, or the lack of it, depends on the fortitude of the media information that is emitted by the facades. The stronger and hotter the information the more people will gaze
at it, and become in a different state of mind. Commercial contexted public spaces are the decors where this is played out the most. To upgrade this type of public space into a more engaging one,
one needs to implicate facades too. In order to play with the modes of perception of the public one needs to understand the influence of the media on the behaviour of the public. By considering the
façade as being canvasses one can alter the scale, colour and composition in order to connect the
public to the façade in the specifically intended way. Next to adjusting the facades there is also a way to convey media via the public space floor. These methods are similar to those of the facades but also include a more functional approach, because the public space’s intention is to be used.
To successfully implicate the facades into public space design, a transition - of the theory of Marshall McLuhan about hot vs. cool into practical design tools - is needed.
The main purpose of using this theory is to contruct the backbones of creating a vibrant public space
and re-activates the public on it. Because where the commercial public spaces currently are all about shopping, they can become independend, interesting and exciting spaces again.
Sybren Stroo, 2010