Changing the Rules: Architecture and the New Millennium

Convergence 7 (2):113-125 (2001)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Architecture is about to enter its first magical phase: a time when buildings actively co-operate with their inhabitants; when objects know what they are, where they are, what is near them; when social and physical space lose their type coupling; when wall and partitions change with mood and task. As engineers and scientists explore how to digitse the world around us, the classical constraints of design, ruled so long by the physics of space, time, and materials, are starting to crumble. Documents can be laid down in one place, automatically cloned, and a copy picked up in another. Meetings scheduled for 9am to 10am can be joined by latecomers at noon, who then participate in a captured form of the event and are ‘edited into’ the past. People on the West coast of the USA can participate, in a telepresent way, with their colleagues on the East coast, and hold a meeting against a virtual backdrop, such as a production line in their Taiwanese factory. Walls seem to dematerialise, remote objects can be touched virtually, shaped, passed through one another. Technology is moving inexorably so that being in one place at a time no longer need dominate how we work and play. Material boundaries are losing their meaning, and interface and information space are catch words that architects must master. In this article I will discuss some of the theoretical ideas shaping our new conception of form, function, and interactivity. My view is that of a cognitive scientist interested in how cognition is distributed throughout our environment. Since the ground rules defining the structure of environments are changing, our very idea of how we are embedded in the world is changing. Architecture is at a new frontier.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Changing the Rules: Architecture in the New Millennium.David Kirsh - 2001 - Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 7 (2):113-125.
Space: in science, art, and society.François Penz, Gregory Radick & Robert Howell (eds.) - 2004 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dwelling In-Between Walls: The Architectural Surround. [REVIEW]Søren Riis - 2011 - Foundations of Science 16 (2-3):285-301.
Contextual logic with modalities for time and space.Haim Gaifman - 2008 - Review of Symbolic Logic 1 (4):433-458.
Theorizing a contradiction between form and function in architecture.John Hendrix - 2012 - South African Journal of Art History 27 (1):9-28.
Prospects for an Ethics of Architecture.William M. Taylor - 2011 - Routledge. Edited by Michael P. Levine.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-02-19

Downloads
803 (#19,435)

6 months
50 (#89,115)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

David Kirsh
University of California, San Diego

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references