Exploring Space through Dynamic Information and Social Media. Re-conceptualising Geography as Information. Re-practicing the Design Approach as bottom-up and crowd-sourced; not as top-down and designer-centralised.
The Infrastructure - 24hr Remote Infrastructure (Lockers for 4000 people, Data Storage for 4000 people, Security, IT, Concierge, GPS Bicycle and Segway, Central Receptionist/Librarian, Upgrades to Existing Library on site).
To design a still tower for a society of mobile knowledge workers is redundant. A static, mono-located office space designed for said workers to perform his/her task is defunct considering the anywhere/anytime and ‘anyplace’ potentials that wireless mobility affords.
Is a new highrise office development required? A run by Yahoo! Pipes against market sources such as realcommercial.com.au and commercialrealestate.com.au reveals exact locations and rentable areas in Parramatta. Add those disparate envelopes up and you will find more vacant spaces than those designed for the Parramatta Masterplan.
In terms of the working environment, no new forms, materials, etc are required, simply upgrades and infrastructure additions. In this case, what are the still forms of space that is required in this new workspace system? Data Farms, Processor Farms, Central Receptionist Areas, Lockers, in short: remote infrastructure.
Now that there is no top-down architectural hierarchy and order where there is bottom-up micro-coordination, how do you determine a space-syntax to the scheme?
Geographic features are fed into Yahoo Pipes and measured against end user ratings from bottom up sources such as Truelocal.com. A restaurant located along a nicely designed avenue that is close to public transport scores lightly compared to the strip of restaurants further north of Church Street in which the locals dub “Little Paris”. Fields of influence i.e. likely scope of travel an average user would like to spend travelling to from his/her workplace are extrapolated and densified against the end user ratings.
Routine
We have established that the relationship between the spaces and external features is one based on something similar to end user ratings and leeways, rather than top-down principles of order, form, scale etc.
We could now reverse engineer these score to predict likely usages of the vacant building floors, and in turn optimise the organisation of said spaces. For example, a wanderer who is mindset on getting a cup of coffee before work will “given the opportunity” likely end up in a space close to the coffee shop if there is no preconception on where he/she is going to work at. Similarly, A client coming into town requesting a face-to-face meeting will likely be held in a office space close to his/her hotel and near parking facilities.
Remote
A plethora of infrastructure upgrades is likely to be expected to sustain The Distributed Office. To effectively cater for the wireless, anytime/anywhere knowledge work society we will need to implement rigorous plug and play capabilities in the new teleoffices, including integrated access (via swipe card, smartphones etc), hardware docking stations, shared print facilities and teleconferencing.
Ironically, the only fixed, built function is that relating to the storage of vast data servers and processors located in the refurbished library. Here, traditional office services can integrate and operate in a more efficient manner. A librarian can adopt his/her expertise in indexing and archiving to store all hard-goods and information of multiple peoples and corporations. A centralised receptionist centre can operate like an IT support service, directing all incoming calls, emails, people etc to their respective locations. With this comes an invigorated role of the librarian and the receptionist; once considered as a low assistant based profession can now be redefined as an all-seeing archiver/indexer and a mover/shaker. Premium customers can opt for a concierge service where goods are brought directly to their place. However, the new consolidation entails drawbacks; longer working hours for library staff, and the library itself is expected to operate 24-hours.
Generally, nothing significant needs to be done to the existing vacant lots; besides minor infrastructure upgrades as mentioned.
Hub
Replacing hard information with soft information in the context of a library entails interesting dualities. Books are now seen as technology that behaves in replication and redundancy, one collection stacked upon each other, one edition after another. Social Media and bottom-up information however has the characteristics of renewal and reassembly, updating on the click of the refresh button. While books are collections of many individual objects of single strings of information, digital and social media are its binary opposite; one collection – continually refreshed information. The building lives in a refreshed state, responding to information, and also to infrastructural use (the coming and going of bikes, the fluctuations in network and computer usage, the amount of hard content stored and retrieved etc).
Flashback to last semesters trip to one of the creative Sydney talks where people have been tracking the movements of Sydneys design community (literally) though GPS time lapse mapping. The interesting thing from the exercise they did was to show how the office was not just one place you visit everyday; in fact these team workers stop at multiple locations, crossing different suburbs and taking multiple long distance trips throughout the whole day.
As a side note ive just discovered that the idea of a distributed office have been implemented in the past, and packaged into something Go-Get style called a "Telework Center"
Montage, with images from own collection and quoted from Bernard Tschumi, "Architecture and Disjunction"
....And to continue again in the words of Tschumi; "Architecture is defined by the actions it witnesses as much as by the enclosure of its walls." It doesnt matter how a space is designed and where it is placed; nothing exists between architecture, order and program.
Diagrams: Bernard Tschumi: Parc de la Villette. A programmatic brief is decomposed and reassembled prior to being scattered through an arbitary grid on the site. Images courtesy of Max-Roslin Melser.
As Tschumi stresses that there is no longer any relationship between architecture to program and meaning, can we say that there in the 21st century there is nothing you can draw between the task, the activity, the event and the architecture it is encompassed by, especially now that 'function' and 'cognition' is taken over by portable and wearable devices? Peel the thoughts of architecture away from neogeography, and you will find the most popular places happening in any odd locations; someones warehouse, a piece of road, etc.
Assume from the above that any location is good to place a space, as long as things will happen in them, forgoing ideas such as siting, site analysis, main views and vistas etc. Consider also that a 'brand new building' for a mobile set of knowledge workers is now defunct. In conclusion, there will not be a brand new CBD precinct physically built into the intended site.
Now consider dispersing space; if the idea of mobile working is that it could occur remotely, we have a premise that the new architecture for the wireless office is parts of here and there. And there are abundant existing office spaces opened for lease and sale. No new spaces are required. Herein lies the invisible envelope. The new building envelope. The distributed office building!
Net NLA - The Net Leasable Area (NLA) of the existing proposal (107,375 m2), minus the NLA of all the buildings required to be demolished for this masterplan (32,744 m2). Masterplan data sourced from Parramatta City Council.
Filtered via realcommercial.com and commercialrealestate.com with removal of duplicates, via Yahoo Pipes and ArcGIS.
The critique last week hit hard some of the realities of the project which i have been neglecting. Mainly the risk that has become evident now is that the architectural brief itself has almost disappeared.
How do i take these ideas of dynamic information and social technology into a brief and realise this into a project. This is something that needs some urgent dwelling into. At one point in experiment 3 a quick attempt of trying to architecturalize the concepts in experiment 1 and 2 proved insufficient, as trying to force four walls into something that cant be described by four walls is a challenging paradox, and a huge risk in the project.
My initial idea of a wireless and remotely activated office/work/play culture has now turned into an evaluation on information as reflected in networking. As a result, simply designing a 'wireless workplace' in the general sense (you can do your work wherever) does not do the research much justice. It was pointed out that 'Viral Places' are not simply about the geographic location but what happens in those co-ordinates that are shared and reflected upon in a social networked society, by people in turn existing in multiple geographic locations. Geographic location is irrelevant. The question is now how can you bring architecture into places and situations that dont want to be in one place?
The break is a good time to burn through some more various blogs out there and some readings. Also there needs to be more filtering of those experiment outcomes, with some to be discarded and some carried forward, and packaged to be more succinct rather than generalised. Either focus on dynamic information, or social media, but not both. Most importantly what the final outcome at the end of next semester is going to be; do i pursue in designing something in a location, to be viewed in plans, elevations, sections, models, renderings? Or maybe reduce the physical scope of the product; can say an installation in a foyer space, a short film, a short animation?
And see below for the documentation on the final experiment. Please be patient with this as there are tons of externally linked videos that flash has to load up on every page.
//Encountering difficulties uploading the flash file to my FTP, will have a go again later today//
