Ubiquitus Culture in Architecture

ABSTRACT:
This paper describes the idea of ubiquitous computing and particularly its applications in architecture through different examples that explores these applications in different scales. After following many steps computing nowadays is escaping from the conditions of a single object,( the p.c) to expand in physical space, in our environment. The concept of post-desktop models together with human-computer interaction is what Mark Weiser called "The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing"the era that we have already entered. Starting from the scale of a single floor or a façade, we then analyse one of the first architectural examples of interaction the Kunsthaus to finish with the description of the u- city(u=ubiquitous)in the city of Incheron (South Corea) one of the latest and few examples of this notion that is already under construction.After checking the different systems that these examples are using we introduce three reconsiderations that emerge from the tendency of ubiquity: the notion of “situations”as developed in architecture after the first definition that the situationists implied, the idea of memory in the frame of new type of storing information in the buildings and the notion of controlling systems and privacy especially when referring to a whole city.

Keywords: ubiquitous computing, interaction, controlling system, interactive surface, Kaunsthaus, u-city, memory

We found different examples in which we detect the fusion of translated signals applied in architecture. Different kind of sensors convert a signal from one form of energy to another, from one form of information to another, enabling the whole system to become interactive.

Son-O-House
The Son-O-House, is a public pavilion that is both an architectural and a sound installation that allows people to not just hear sound in a musical structure, but also to participate in the composition of the sound…This permanent installation creates an interaction between the sound, the architecture and the visitors. To create the specific experience the architects collaborated with Edwin van der Heide, an artist who continuously experiments with the sound, exploring the creation of interacting and learning environments. The particular system of sounds is based on moiré effects of interference of closely related frequencies. 23 sensors are positioned at strategic spots to indirectly influence the music.These sensors detect the presence, activity and the approximate location of the visitors. The particular information is analyzed and quantified,in a growing database and is used to control the nature of the sound. Therefore the visitors are challenged to re-interpret their relationship with the environment. As a visitor one does not influence the sound directly, which is so often the case, one influences the real-time composition itself that generates the sounds. In this way the sound environment of the Son-O-House is in continuous evolution. The score is an evolutionary memoryscape that develops with the traced behavior of the actual bodies in the space.

Galleria West Shopping Centre in Seoul, Korea - 2002-2004
Designed by Ben van Berkel from UN Studio architects and Arup Lighting, the Galleria West has a perpetually changing, light-reactive and computer-programmable facade that behaves like a giant video screen.
The shopping centre’s façade works like a large low-res television, with each LED fixture acting as one pixel. It is the control system that converts and transmits data to the 40,000-square-foot screen that most sets this project apart. “This is the first time the user doesn't need lighting programming skills,” explains Van der Heide. “You can create animations using any software that you are comfortable with, and just upload it to a server. Once the data on the server is converted into a proprietary protocol based on TCP/IP, it then travels over 32 DMX lines (or universes), which control 512 channels each, to deliver the many commands that 'dress' the façade. The system can also be connected to and programmed wirelessly from a laptop on the street, for example.” [1]
The facade is made up of 4330 glass disks, each 850mm in diameter, that were treated with a special iridescent foil, which causes constant changes. The disks are programmed to generate up to 16 millions colors, showing astounding displays in every imaginable shade. Beneath each one is a polyester dichroic light filter creating a range of colors that change depending on the position of the sun. The filter separates the different wavelengths of light, absorbing some and reflecting others depending on the angle at which it hits. Also fitted behind the glass discs are LED fittings that come into their own at night, and are programmed to emit a sequence of colors and patterns between sunset and sunrise.
The building makes a complete transformation during the day and evening. The colour of the façade changes, depending on the position of the sun and the viewing position. During the day, it reflects the subtleties of natural light on the dichroic glass discs. At other times the building can even become a giant billboard, its pixels feeding text or images around the entire external structure. At night a special lighting scheme illuminates the discs by reflecting the dynamics of the weather conditions that happened during the day.

references:
http://www.unstudio.com/projects/year/2004/1/141
http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=453&storycode=3051692
http://www.arup.com/netherlands/newsitem.cfm?pageid=6693
http://www.archlighting.com/industry-news.asp?sectionID=1312&articleID=454081

[1] http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=453&storycode=3051692

Smart floors
One of the surfaces that by nature the human have more interaction with is the floor. Gravity keep us in direct contact with it, this is why Robert J. Orr and Gregory D. Abowd think on why not to do it an interactive surface or "smart floor". Their main goal was two of the most important one on Ubiquitous Computing: identifying and locating a user.
The way this smart floor works, is having measurements cells located on each corner of the floor tile, each tile have 3 tiles resting on it. Each one of this systems working together can measure the force of the user's foot (ground reaction force, GRF) as the user walks around the space and this information can be storage on a system trough a network to have it like a signature of each individual user, so that way the user can be recognized by the system just by matching the information. Once the system recognize the user, tracking this individual becomes really easy.

Intelligent bathrooms
On March 30 of 2005, two large companies of Japan, Yamato House and TOTO have meet together to create a user interactive system called "the intelligent rest room". With the main goal of family health, integrating intelligent devices into a normal bathroom space.
The idea of this integration is to have more control over human body health care by adding measurement sensors all around the bathroom space and objects, measuring sugar levels, blood pressure, body fat percent and weight.
All this daily analysis can be send to the family computer or even to the doctor's office trough a wireless network, once in the computer software health analysis that comes with the system, will analyze this results and advices on health care, diet or exercises to do. All this results will be displayed on a digital screen located on the bathrooms wall, at the same time this information is storage for medical history.

"A new epoch has begun..."

“A new epoch has begun . . .
We must create the mass-produced spirit.
The spirit of living in mass-construction homes.
The spirit of conceiving mass-produced homes.”
Le Corbusier, 1923

In the 1940s, Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann developed a factory based on mass-production system, to manufacture highly customizable homes – the Packaged House. Gropius wrote, “It is by the provision of interchangeable parts that (we) can meet the public’s desire for individuality and offer the client the pleasure of personal choice and initiative without jettisoning aesthetic unity.” The effort failed spectacularly. The aim was to produce 10,000 houses per year, but by the time the company was closed, less than 200 had been manufactured.[1]
Now, more than a half century later, digital technologies make it possible to replace both inefficient labor-intensive site production as well as inflexible mass-production with agile mass-customization, enabling formal and technological possibilities.
Greg Lynn’s Embryological House Project (2000), is one of the contemporary projects that mark the intercept of architecture and mass-customization.
“The Embryologic Houses can be described as a strategy for the invention of domestic space that engages contemporary issues of brand identity and variation, customization and continuity, flexible manufacturing and assembly and, most importantly, an unapologetic investment in the contemporary beauty and voluptuous aesthetics of undulating surfaces rendered vividly in iridescent and opalescent colours. They employ a rigorous system of geometrical limits that liberate models of endless variations. Addressing brand identity and variation allows “recognition and novelty” and “design innovation and experimentation”[2]
To both design innovation and experimentation, many of the variations in the Embryologic houses come from an adaptation to contingencies of lifestyle, site, climate, construction methods, materials, spatial effects, functional needs and special aesthetic affects.[5]
The biologic borrowings shape a certain mode of contemporary architecture as a more naturalistic mode of production, and introduce a new internal history of architecture. “There is no ideal or original Embryologic house. Everyone is perfect in its mutations.”[3] The variation occurs in the relationship between the generic envelope and a fixed collection of elements, “marking a shift from a modernist, mechanical technique to a more vital, evolving, biological model of embryological design and construction”[4,6]
[1] http://www.architectureweek.com/2004/0818/building_2-2.html
[2,3,4]Lynn, Greg. “Greg Lynn: Embryological Houses,” AD “Contemporary Processes
in Architecture”, London: John Wiley & Son, 2000: 26-35.
[5,6] http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2100/467/1/Burns_Greg+Lynn.pdf

Reinventing/dematerialising materiality

As digital space is redefining almost all the common terms of physical space, materiality seems to be a top priority to be updated with this new order. Multiple tendencies actualize this new wave of reinventing materiality. We are dealing with a revolution of different methods and totally new tools to actually manipulate and fabricate the traditional materials. At the same time, a huge amount of the current research is being held on how a material is transformed to a media that carries information, dematerializing in this way materiality.

In the first category, materials such as concrete and glass are treated in such a way that we eventually "question" their rules and disciplines. We are able to interfere in the material and make it contradicting itself while the principle of its origin remains the same. Unexpected characteristics to traditional materials introduce stimulating spatial mutations. Francis Bacon comments on this inevitable replacement that enriches the experience of an action. In one of his paintings he represents a foot opening a door (instead of a hand that would make sense to everyone). He is convinced that if you represent a particular action by replacing a common feature of the action with an unexpected one, the experience of this action becomes even more powerful.

- bending concrete -

In this sense, concrete can be trasparent, flexible and lighter in weight and can be used for ephemeral architectural structures, features that were not familiar with concrete in the past.

Of course it is not only a matter of a strong stimulus. The idea of "hypermaterial" that puts together the advantages of multiple materials and examines the behavior of composite materials in order to create improved versions and promote innovation is equally popular among the researchers. The University of Michigan has developed a new type of fiber-reinforced bendable concrete whch looks like regular concrete, but is 500 times more resistand to cracking and 40% lighter in weight. Tiny fibers that comprise about 2% of the mixture's volume partly account for its performance. Traditional concrete has many problems including the lack of durability and sustainability, failure under severe loading, and the resulting expenses of repair. U-M's Victor Li beleives that Engineering Cement Composites (ECC) addresses most of those problems. It looks exactly like regular concrete, but under excessive strain, the specially coated network of fibers veining the cement is allowed to slide within the cement, thus avoiding the inflexibility that causes brittleness and breakage, Li said.

Another example is the Concrete Canvas Shelter (CCS) is a shelter that conists of a cement-impregnated fabric (Concrete Cloth) bonded to the outer surface of an inflated plastic inner structure. The CCS is a rapidly deployable hardened shelter that requires only water and air for erection. It can be deployed by two people without any training in approximately thirty minutes and is ready to use in twelve hours.

The latest research on artificial intelligence and robotics is the frame of the second category, a process that tends to dematerialize materials and almost introducing to them "software" that interacts with the environment in order to gather and give back information. An almost sculptural form that invites people to touch it and sweats as a response making a sharp comment on the "wet" domain of nature and the "dry" domain of electronics. When multimedia is built in the material's own fabric, the material itself is more like a complicated system, an "installation" that is more powerful than the material itself. That affects the haptic and optic experience of space redefines human perception.

"Light-Emitting Roof Tiles" is an example that allows the intergration of additional functions within roof tiles are intergrated light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and designed to display text, pictures, and other graphical content in multiple colors. Information may also be animated, such as with an illuminated news trailer.

- bubble sccreen strip -

Another example is the Bubble Screen is a dot-matrix display that uses air bubbles as pixels. Developed by Eval Burstein at Beta Tank, this display can show images, text, and patterns and may be used as a low-resolution screen. The project required two years of development during which experts in the fields of automation, pneumatics, and academia were employed to solve a fluid dynamics challenge. The Bubble Screen is the intended to reveal alternative methods of information display and consumption and is exemplary of Beta Tank's ongoing ambient information-design project. [Contact: Beta Tank, London, UK]

All the examples are from the site of the book Trasmaterials:

http://www.transstudio.com/tm/

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2000/11/40108

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0304/msg00011.html

computing complexity

“vertical structure is overrated … it’ s just an expeditious way for architects to calculate force, to just calculate it in reference to a vertical column… A building should communicate in a more dynamic way in order to react to the people moving within it.”[1]
Until now, architects have understood movement as the travel of a moving eye in space and architecture, in both its realization and its conception, has been understood as static, fixed, ideal and inert. In architecture motion, dynamics and flows are typically expressed through symbolic views of static forms. Buildings have been constructed as static forms, and architecture has been conceived and designed based on symmetry and immobility.

Digital evolution introduces a new design method, which affects the whole architectural process, from concept to construction. Now, space can be highly plastic, flexible, and mutable in its dynamic evolution through motion and transformation. Form can not only be defined by its internal parameters, but can be also effected by a variety of other fluctuating external, invisible forces and gradients (f.e. gravity, wind, turbulence, magnetism, moving particles) that are used as abstract analogies (pedestrian and automotive movement, environmental forces, intensities of use and occupation in time).
Greg Lynn FORM, is one of the first architectural offices that integrated the computer in its design process in an increasingly innovative manner and has produced projects that challenge traditional design methods. Computer programs are the tools to investigate the design through animations and the moving section, and to represent the project both in 2D and 3D.The office views the incorporation of state of the art hardware and software as a set of tools to investigate architectural performance within the framework of theories based on performance parameters that are only now being theorized in architecture.
“Organic design is not just a style” Lynn says. “Design, architecture and life will continue to become more and more biological, not merely biomorphic. I look forward to the software that lets us design not just the shape but also the growth and behaviour of animate matter. Designers and architects will continue to proliferate as there is more and more need for design, as we get access to more matter through genetic and biological innovations.”[2]


[1] http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/greg_lynn.shtml

[2] http://www.iconeye.com/articles/20070823_42

http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-128267

Interfacing Realities: Lecture by Greg Lynn

http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/text/.xslt/nodenr-128267

http://www.basilisk.com/G/GREG_LYNN_FORM_760.html

(image above: Greg Lynn Embriological Housing

http://www.digischool.nl/ckv2/ckv3/kunstentechniek/lynn/greglynn.htm)