(as illustrated by Domestic Robocop)
Online content has “spilled over” from its web-browser container. What was a docile pool of information is now permeating all forms of media. Originally bound to desktops, it can now be found radiating on every street, from mobile phones, digital displays and other devices. As its volume has reached a critical point of proliferation it has become self-perpetuating. This growth is more like a bacterial colony than an avalanche, with web 2.0 supporting this explosion of growth.
Definitions of web 2.0 vary from “web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing” to “A mix of technology and business processes”. The concept of “sharing” is common to all, creating an unstable cloud of information, accessible and continuously edited by all users.
And yet, this is only one enclave of a much wider attitude that has been steadily developing. Similar principles can be found in fields from agriculture to quantum physics. Autonomous elements with fixed roles are giving way to flexible fields, where meanings are established through relationships within their current context. This difference is best described by Reiser, who compares chess to Go. The figures in chess have their differentiated roles and behaviours which are stable regardless of the context they are put in. Contrarily, the pieces in Go are all uniform. The role of each individual piece is defined by its context. Multiple pieces assume new roles as they are grouped in certain ways and draw power from their neighbours.
It is a transition from black-and-white relationships to shades-of-gray. While this shift might be logical and in some cases inevitable, it is less so for the computing world, where bits of information are either 1s or 0s. However as bits are bound together in bigger packages, they can be more malleable and adaptable. Regardless, they remained essentially rigid until the emergence of web 2.0 with its informal organizational logic.
The essential shift is not so much in the separation of content and container. The same slice of information, either the original piece or a copy of it, was always potentially present simultaneously in different environments. The added value is added with its association with other similar slices of data, as commonly illustrated with tag clouds. It is through these affiliations that the actual power of the network grows. With continuous adjustments by scores of users the cloud gains in size and diversity. In effect, it is a transition from an array of unconnected elements to a continuous field with various differentiations. The inherent rigidness of computer operation has been “softened” and made to work in “human” way.
It is only natural for architecture to echo these fluid concepts. Stylistically it could be described as a shift from modernism to blobism, but that would be an oversimplification. Essentially, the shift is from a top-down approach to bottom-up growth. In modernism the leading idea was systematically implemented in all scales of a project, working from larger to smaller scales. This generated a coherent result, yet lacked adaptability. Contrarily, web 2.0 promotes an upside-down approach. A leading idea is used as general guidance, but work starts at the smallest scale, which gains momentum through numbers and associations, steering the development of the entire project.
The result should be adapted to any given situation. And yet that is not the case most times. This is because of over-simplified starting points, as they create circumstances which fail to reflect the complexity of the actual environment. Additionally, any static solution in a dynamic environment is bound to become outdated at some point or another.
Modernism’s rigidity is perhaps best embodied in Rietveld’s Red and Blue Chair. Although very systematic in the choice of shapes, materials and colours, it is less than perfectly adapted to the user. Grcic took a step further with Chair One, which is an in-between point in development. Although its optimized shape it is both efficient and comfortable, it’s still constructed in a rigid way, not exploiting its own full potential. Laarman has taken this a step further still with Bone Chair, which is metaphorically chiselled from a solid mass, making the best possible use of the material available, while offering optimum support for the user.
The only element missing is adaptability. This is achieved in R&Sie n’s project “I’ve heard about”, which is essentially scale-less, adaptable for growing into anything from chairs, rooms or entire buildings. It embodies a separation from any dogmatic preconceptions. Similarly to web 2.0, there is a rough idea of what the end result should be, however each step towards it depends wholly on its own unique conditions. The result is less a chair or a house, but the built form of the conceptual cloud, continuously adapting to itself, becoming bigger, more diversified and specialized at the same time.
