Architecture as Atmospheric Media: Tange Lab and Cybernetics (original) (raw)

Envisioning an Urban Space That Integrates Architecture into an Information Oriented Society

There is an assumption that architecture can provide an evocative vision of an artificial environment using digitized and wireless communication technology. It is a ideal based on perception of virtual space, where distance is minimized through the continual process of breaking barriers in non-visible planes. It is the domain of the mind, in which the object becomes real by individual choice. It is conceived in a plane known as virtual space or cyber space. Marcos Novak describes it as “space created as habitat for our imagination”. What are the new tendencies in Architecture? These are unknown yet. There is an incursion in different areas, it is seen that the scope of architecture includes Transparency, mix media, layering, transarchitecture, and hypersurfaces. It is an expression of high-speed technology in the process of change, pointing to the new frontier of “Space”. My focus is toward the integration

On architecture and media

1993

This part of the book explores how architects and urban developers apply computational solutions and create a fusion of architecture and media. The use of new technologies for communication, sustainability, functionality, and economy of resources is discussed next. Issues that are relevant to computational methods in design, urban aesthetics, ambient computing, sustainable habitats, novel materials, biology-inspired projects, and many others all pertain to innovative solutions that we can observe in architecture. Themes related to some of the tools and technologies, models of architectural structures, intelligent buildings, and sustainable and green architecture complete this chapter.

Connecting the Dots: How Digital Culture Is Changing Urban Design

2016

The topic of agency in cities brings up a fundamental question that urban thinkers have been dealing with for a long time: to what extent does the physical form of the city influence the way people behave? How exactly, in other words, do urban forms act in themselves as agents of urbanity? We know that the relationship between people and their physical environments is not purely mechanical and could never be reduced to a simple functionalist explanation. A change in a city square's furniture, for example, will not deeply affect the way its users experience it. On the other hand, space is never neutral, and the discussion on "agents" as systems that are active, distinguished from their environment, and acting according to a predefined set of goals (Barandiaran, Di Paolo, Rohde, 2009) opens up the very possibility that urban forms might be considered agents themselves. Barandiaran et al. raised this issue when they asked if a niche could be regarded as an agent (Ibid, p....

Urban media geographies: Interfacing ubiquitous computing with the physicality of urban space

2013

This paper aims at establishing an associative relation between the proliferating digital technologies, the physical context of the urban fabric, its inhabitants and the multiplicity of their activities as an emergent phenomenon of contemporary urbanity. It introduces a methodological framework for the development of an interactive urban system, installed within urban open public spaces, in the form of a hybrid interface that can serve as a platform designated for both citizens and municipal planning authorities. This particular system harnesses and analyzes real-time, quantifiable traces of diverse everyday urban activities and subsequently feeds this analyzed information back in a looped manner to citizens via the proposed public interfaces. Subsequently they can observe, interact and declare their own activity-driven, customized spatial and infrastructural usage and transformation alternatives. In other words, the platform does not only imply interaction at an information exchang...

Aesthetics of Information: Cyberizing the Architectural Artifact

Proceeding of the 5th. Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology. Connecticut College Center for the Arts and Technology. pp.200-216 , 1995

One of the basic tenets of humanistic inquiry is that intellectual and artistic production should be aimed at understanding, exploring, and building a society's zeitgeist. In this view, it is the pro-active making and critique of culture and not a re-active posture which ought to occupy committed people. In architecture, this issue increasingly dominates contemporary reflections. What is the architecture of and for the information revolution / age / society ? Is it possible to honestly maintain a material and traditional understanding of architecture in a world increasingly dominated by disembodied, electronic information ? Can we approach architecture from an informational paradigm ? Although architecture possesses an informational nature, there is a big gap between this fact and seeing architecture as an information construct. Further still is trying to transform buildings into artifacts fully responsive to (driven by) information flows. The major problem lies in the stable nature of matter once it has been formed. The act of building freezes certain kinds of information in time which then preclude the displays of other, new information. In other words, constructions neither have nor respond to the fluid nature of information. Or do they? If one cannot deny the material stability of constructions, one can argue against their representational stability. After all electronic technologies provide us with artifacts that defy the representational stability of matter. Television sets and computers are good examples. The screen makes these artifacts' presence (i.e. their materiality, fixed information) far less important than what they present (i.e. representations, fluid information). At issue is not what happen behind or around but on their screens. Quite simply, the function of TVs and computers is not to be pieces of furniture or machinery but windows to the virtual world of information. The true power of these constructions is not their technological might but their ability to sustain media events. Considering that it is mediated reality upon which post-industrial life depends, it seems natural that material stability is surrendered to the power of fleeting, foreign representations. If Modernity used the machine as the metaphor to guide its quest for an architecture of and for the industrial age, can't we use the prime technologies and media of the information revolution as ours? This paper explores one possible direction: the creation of an architecture of screens.

Architecture in Digital Culture: Machines, Networks and Computation

Routledge, 2022

This book examines the manifestations of architecture, cities, and design processes within digital culture. Adopting a comparative and critical method, the author looks at past and present encounters of the digital with architectural discourse and practice. Along three central themes-machines, networks, and computation-the book begins by discussing transformations of the analogy between architecture and the machine since the early twentieth century, foregrounding questions about the relations between architecture, humans, machines, and the environment. It moves on to the city, to observe how big data and smart city sustainable management systems have transformed historical visions of global networked cities. Lastly, it explores computational design thinking historically and in the context of complex systems, as well as the latest technical, social, and economic developments. Exposing possible drawbacks while still focusing on what is radically innovative, this book proposes a way toward more liberating, digital, and sustainable futures for architecture. An important read for architecture students, academics, and professionals, this book connects instances of digital architecture practice and discourse throughout the history of the digital culture paradigm and their ties with sociopolitical developments. It shares the possibility that these connecting lines may be the canvas for a novel architectural history of the recent past.

The Digital Age & Architecture

The Digital Age & Architecture: An Exploratory Essay I was young when computers started to remodel the world; I remember my mom yelling at me to turn the internet off so she could answer the phone. At that time, I had no idea that a new Digital Paradigm Change was underway, revolutionizing how the world operated. This paradigm change is the biggest since the Industrial Revolution, with digital technologies making advancements all over the world. As part of the Millennial Generation, I grew up with computers, making it hard to think what the world was like before such technology. Learning from a young, I started my Architecture Degree with an astute aptitude in digital technologies.

New Media and the Prolongations of Urban Environments

Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies, 2010

The article addresses the relationships between new media and public urban environments. It advances an anti-reductionist argument, which seeks to understand the material and the immaterial as two irreducible yet intertwined layers or levels of the social sphere. In order to do so, the notion of prolongation is proposed. This notion, together with those of territory and visibility, is explicitly designed to escape both reductionist monism (material as immaterial or vice versa) and dualism (material versus immaterial). The hypothesis is that the environments created and edited by the new media can be conceptualized and studied as specific visibility regimes of urban territoriality. The use of the concepts of territory, prolongation, and visibility also leads to deexceptionalizing the new media, insofar as new media are explained as a specific techno-social configuration, determined by a pattern of the same analytical variables that are at stake in the social sphere at large.

Living with Urban Everyday Technologies

ESPES, 2020

New and complex technologies are exceedingly present and in widespread use in contemporary cities globally. The urban lifeworld is saturated with various applications of information and computing technologies, but also more rudimentary forms of technology construct and create the urban everyday life as we know it. Many forms of urban technologies are perceived first through their everyday aesthetic qualities: how they look, feel, sound, or are otherwise encountered within the streetscape. Philosophical aesthetics, however, has tended to overlook everyday technologies as a topic, often due to unquestioned ideas of how a city should ideally look and feel. Thus, a more realistic approach to contemporary cities is needed, in which the deep-seated role of technologies is recognized and the experiences related to their entangled uses become acknowledged. This paper brings together recent developments in urban aesthetics with some of the core ideas of postphenomenological approaches to new urban technologies.