UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA
udd
24
FREESTYLE
federico soriano
1
Textos 2020-2021
Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg (Space Popular). Software as infraestructure - Space Popular. e-flux architecture
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Not so many centuries ago places, buildings and cities were their own and only form of visual representation. They stood in one place and could not be transported but in stories and songs through the memories and imagination of people who had experienced them first-hand. A type or style of architecture was bound to the ground they stood on, not only physically but also virtually, and seldom spread beyond its immediate geographic and social boundaries. Then, as now, technological and cultural innovation was reliant on the exchange of knowledge. Without the ability to transport information through reliable and trustworthy media, the evolution of grounded artefacts like buildings evolved slowly and only over short distances. This limited and fixed state ended 500 years ago as architecture, enabled by print, started to travel virtually through vast distances, only to appear physically again by the hand of people who were just as distant in the first place. The media that buildings initially travelled by was the book— the first mass media object containing flattened visual representations of architecture which could be transported without much physical deterioration or distortion of the information contained therein. The first ideas and representations of architecture to travel virtually through the book came from Renaissance Italy and spread across Europe in books like Sebastiano Serlio’s On the Five Styles of Buildings first printed in Venice in 1537, which described reproducible elements in clear black and white illustrations.
Screenshot from mixed reality film FREESTYLE - ACT 1. Fifteenth to sixteenth century: The book brings continental ideals about architecture to England, 2020. 2
Architecture’s visual representation was dominated by the book and etchings for centuries. Later came photography, cinema, television, and eventually the internet, where increasingly complex and precise information about buildings could be transferred at ever greater speed and distances. This steady progression has in turn led to styles of architecture replacing each other at ever greater speed with many distinct and impactful ones lasting only a decade or two and being identified with more discrete characteristics. Architectural style is formed within media and it is independent from place. Besides speed and availability, aesthetic fidelity also plays an important role in the transfer and formation of architectural styles through media. The amount of senses involved in communication is fundamental to the effective transfer of any message. Reading a description of a space in text can be informative and stimulating, but seldom further transferable between individuals as the amount of subjective interpretation is higher the further from the source we get. Photography, film, and videogames take us closer to a more comprehensive transfer. Immersive wearable media will, in our lifetime, be able to achieve unprecedented degrees of visual and aural fidelity that combine the qualities of all previous formats, all perceived in three dimensions.
Screenshot from mixed reality film FREESTYLE - ACT 3. Twentieth century: The motion picture, the video console, and the internet open a new path for architecture, 2020. 3
the further from the source we get. Photography, film, and videogames take us closer to a more comprehensive transfer. Immersive wearable media will, in our lifetime, be able to achieve unprecedented degrees of visual and aural fidelity that combine the qualities of all previous formats, all perceived in three dimensions. The experience of digital 3D models via wearable immersive media has been termed “virtual reality.” This is, however, no more than another step in the long history of immersive virtual architecture. The milleniaold frescoes of Villa Regina in Boscoreale are as much virtual reality as the acclaimed 2020 return to City 17 in Half-Life: Alyx. Not all forms of architectural representation can qualify as a form of virtual reality, however, since not all of them succeed in immersing their viewer within the space they describe or depict. This sense of immersion relies on successfully establishing enough connections to memories that compose a multisensory experience. This is why a text-based description can be more successful in “bringing us there” than a 3D environment experienced through VR goggles, if the references used in the descriptions of space are accurate and relatable. Virtual architectural experiences are therefore not necessarily synonymous with digital technology, and have existed well before the headset. *** Every technological innovation has given origin to a cultural shockwave that ripples through and reshapes our visual culture from within. Consequently, this leads to new styles and forms of behaviour and sociopolitics, as our ways of living are shaped by the way we represent and transfer information. Our buildings and artifacts therefore represent us and our time as much as we represent and embody them. Architectural style is no different than jewelry, sculpture, or graphics in this regard. But it arguably works at a different pace: architecture communicates between generations, not individuals or communities. The style of a building is a collective effort to petrify sets of values and hopes for the future. In this sense, style in architecture is a form of time travel, not a real-time conversation. The incredible speed of development of media infrastructure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led not only to the spread of architectural styles, but also to variation in the ways in which space is thought about, created, and used. It also led to a considerable degree 4
of confusion and overwhelm about how to make sense and use of the newly available style galore. Just as a large vocabulary increases one’s ability to precisely express themself, a wide range of styles in use and circulation increases architecture’s ability and precision in communicating ideas. Today the Pinterest Board enables people without previous knowledge of architectural history to put together images of buildings and interiors and appreciate similarities or recognise patterns that are, in other words, unnamed styles. Sharing these collections of images, we communicate complex and nuanced ideas about space and style that we do not have words or names for. This language is enabled by the sheer quantity and immediate availability of images. As immersive media continues to evolve, individuals might eventually be able to communicate to one another through architecture in ways not too different than we do through images today. If the meme or the emoji are the result of the greatest archive of images becoming readily available and exchangeable through the internet, what happens when virtual spaces and digital environments become created, circulated, and consumed like images? Can the immediacy of architectural space through immersive media and real time rendering lead to a conversational language? [...]
Screenshot from mixed reality film FREESTYLE - ACT 4. Twenty-first century: Virtual environments will set architecture free, 2020. 5
The end of the nineteenth century saw the invention of the motion picture. The glorious 1920s had people dreaming of American movie stars in glamorous Art Deco interiors. Projected in monochrome, the lenticular silver screen exaggerated the effects of strong shadows, contrasts, and refined formal features captured on camera. Not only depicted in cinema itself, Art Deco was frequently chosen as the style for the buildings where films were played and made. A recognizable feature of Odeon cinemas, Art Deco also featured in other mediaproduction buildings such as BBC Broadcasting House. Just before the sophistication of Art Deco took off, another substantial species emerged: the Victorian urban block. Large-scale metropolitan buildings were built in the spirit of the pattern book, replicating units and volumes as vast factories or workhouses and mixing sparse decorative elements of various derivative styles. But the accelerated rate of change in the twentieth century called for a novel type of ornament: trading the spin-cycle of historic conventions for new materials and new types of building. Mechanical efficiency provided inspiration to sweep away the cobwebs and constraints of tradition. Streamlined shiny vehicles, mass produced domestic objects, even flying machines made up the airbrushed dreams of progress. New styles of photography enabled by compact cameras would show these buildings at oblique angles portraying that sense of motion. Increased industrialization, communication, and the abundance of media images made it possible to publish more and cheaper than ever before. This led to an explosion in the number of magazines, gazettes, and periodicals of increasing variety. Print media went from precious to ubiquitous, enabling a new form to enter the toolbox of architectural representation: the collage. Cropped photographs of real people doing everyday things were clipped from magazines and inserted into architectural drawings, suddenly “animating” the abstract and endlessly repeated environments of high Modernism. Picturing life as it might be lived allowed such spaces to become more relatable. At the same time the category of “lifestyle”— packaging the everyday into a consumable form—is invented. 6
Screenshot from mixed reality film FREESTYLE - ACT 4. Twenty-first century: Virtual environments will set architecture free, 2020. Film and television set design becomes a new field for architectural design—as theatre had been in centuries past—with architects like Ken Adam designing the collective imaginary of generations. Now architects were designing the “ideal image” of life, as well as the reality of postwar globalization and urban development. The portrayal of lifestyles—composed of an array of things such as routines, objects, and interiors—could now reach the general public, as opposed to being reserved to personal acquaintances as it was before. The idea of architecture becoming a part of one’s self-image becomes widespread, and the desire to express oneself holistically through the domestic interior in ever more unique ways grows beyond the exclusive circles in which it used to be contained. The fractured references of Postmodernism, which celebrated the symbolic power of pop-culture, went hand in hand with an increased focus on the self, delivering an architecture that aimed to communicate directly and legibly, revelling in shared contemporary images and thumbing its nose at elite conventions. The video-game console opened up an abstract new world: what was once understood as the representation of a physical world became an end in itself: a virtual place to be. Architectural projections became the 7
world of “digital space,” populated with fictional avatars with whom we identify. Architectural styles served the narratives of game scenarios, as we immersed ourselves in 8-bit worlds, while early flirtations with immersive goggles and headsets waited around the corner. The internet is the largest collection of architectural inspiration that has ever existed. This bonanza of content does not come without its challenges, one of them being sorting. Unsorted data is virtually meaningless. The pattern books used by architects in the past did just that—sorting and classifying examples according to type and style. They made use of our unique and powerful ability to recognize what things are and find connections between them. As we look back in time we can see patterns and therefore recognize styles and read meaning into them. Impossibly slow and somewhat incoherent, the history of architecture could be seen as one huge book with millions of authors. A book without words, but with architectural styles in constant translation. This book of styles is being re-written faster than ever, and the more we compile, the more eloquent and expressive we could become. As we find ourselves able to step into virtual worlds, we no longer have to remain on the other side of the frame. Now we can step into virtual buildings and walk around them. We have gone from reading media to experiencing it. Communities are already forming in virtual social spaces, where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world meet, often taking the form of highly stylized virtual avatars. Though there is no need for shelter in virtual space, nearly all of them have some kind of enclosure, showing how architectural style affects our behavior and is intrinsic to how we structure our social and individual values in physical and virtual space. It is only natural that this wide access to architectural style would first lead to an abundance of expression. But we can already see a critical response to the smooth, friction-free digital world: there’s a new wave of architecture which privileges texture and—paradoxically—materiality. A “Haptic Revival,” which flows across realities, physical and virtual alike. In the coming decades, architectural experience as a form of selfexpression will become available to many, enriching a language that once belonged to the few. The promise of inclusiveness does not come 8
Screenshot from mixed reality film FREESTYLE - ACT 1. Fifteenth to sixteenth century: The book brings continental ideals about architecture to England, 2020. without potential for abuse, manipulation, and other forms of misuse. It is in our hands to decide how we shape the future of our newly arrived virtual realm and, in turn, our built environment under the premise of a land of FREESTYLE. *** FREESTYLE – Architectural Adventures in Mass Media is a RIBAcommissioned exhibition by Space Popular and opened at the Architecture Gallery at the Royal Institute of British Architects, London, in February 2020. Software as Infrastructure is a project by e-flux Architecture as part of “Eyes of the City” at the 2019 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Shenzhen). Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research practice led by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg. They create spaces, objects, and events in both physical and virtual space, concentrating on how the two realms will blend together in the near future.
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