the singular Chrysler Building in New York City, a permanent public exoskeleton of the corporate body casting up into the sky, and on the flip side a network of giant metal rectangles in the middle of a field in Arkansas where cars are today assembled within jumbo shipping containers in economic and political obscurity.
But this is only one response to the requirements of a
instrumental interfaces. And so the architecture story is actually a software story as well. Below I consider convergences, replications, and divergences in more detail.
New Context: Architectural
Interfaces Becoming Software
Interfaces
Architecture is being trans-
posed, translated into software
systems. Techniques of organi-
organization to the software, between individuals and individuals through the software, and between some software and other software.
Does this transposition mean that in turn, software becomes the architecture? Yes and no.
In the 1990s it was fashion-
May + June 2008
interactions
software-driven second modernity, which shares the ideal of functionalism with its 20th- century incarnation. What has changed this time is the notion of “functional.” No longer is it sufficient for the built environment to facilitate, for example, a specific industrial process. It must be able to evolve alongside the rapid mutation of industry in general. We see another convergence between the design of the built environment and digital systems, one in which it is no longer sufficient for the program to run the same way every time as it were. Instead organizational programmatic specificity moves from hard architectural interfaces to soft
zational management (where it is that bodies-in-space go, and what they do once they are put there, how they come in contact with each other) that were once the expert province of architecture have since the mid-1960s been transferred to increasingly powerful and nimble software-hardware complexes. This has had a considerable effect on the push and pull of corporate centralization and decentralization, social nearness and farness, cultural privacy and publicity, and individual and collective participation in the modern organization. Much interaction design done during this period sought to provide clearer interfaces between individuals in this
able to imagine that this mac-rotrend of architectural interfaces dissolving into software interfaces spelled the end of cities. Why centralize when we can work from whatever exo-urban enclave we choose? But for many reasons, the continuing urbanization of the planet’s population has only intensified, both driving and being driven by the emergence of a software society. Sociologist-urbanists like Manuel Castells have demonstrated how the globalization of flow contributes to the intensification of throughput through specific, mega-bandwidth urban nodes. Steve Graham has identified a kind of “tunneling effect” whereby bandwidth infrastruc-
References:
Archives