Siim Tuksam

 

The theme of this year’s biennale “Fundamentals” is intriguing because in its precise definition it still allows for interpretation. Since Estonian architecture is greatly influenced by outside factors, the search for a distinctive national style was based on the mix of different styles typical for public spaces in Estonia. The aim of Interspace is to address contemporary architecture through the fundamentals of public space. Therefore, we decided to look at the development of the bastion area of Tallinn. It is the part of the city with the most important public functions and with most significance in terms of urban planning from the end of the Russian empire to the current day Republic of Estonia and beyond. In our study, we expose the different spatial and social changes that have accompanied each of the different regimes in this area, and consider how today’s networked data-society could continue to address public space.

As an e-country, Estonia is an excellent example of a digitised society – not only open to new technologies and prepared for data-based functioning, but even encouraging it. It is believed that the key to a small nation’s success is a knowledge-based economy and automated and optimised social organisation. At least on the level of national discourse, a technology-based ideology dominates in Estonia. To provide a concept of how an e-country could use public space, the Estonian pavilion focuses on topics in contemporary architecture that are tied to technological development, such as data-based design and aesthetics, split agency, personalised readings and incorporating multitude.

Power and ideology

Power has often expressed itself through certain styles representing its ideology. Over the last 100 years Estonia has been under the rule of various occupiers and this is expressed in the urban landscape. The built environment has been rethought many times throughout history; various different statues and monuments have been erected and removed. The most significant embodiments of power are identifiable by their distinctive styles – probably the most dominant being Nevski Cathedral on Toompea. Its onion domes in the city skyline provided a clear message of who was in power. Whether the styles brought about by certain ideologies eventually also express these ideologies is doubtful. In the movie “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” Slavoj Žižek illustrates this with Beethoven’s Symphony No.9, which has been used by various ideological regimes from Nazi Germany to left-wing extremists in Peru. In his interview to Interspace Mark Foster Gage said, “Modernism was meant to be this mass-produced democratic thing, but it became a fetish for the elite”. Even though it seems paradoxical to talk about the development of style based on ideology, I believe that from a theoretical point of view the characteristics of the networked data-society indicate a certain style. Modernisation has been accompanied by a concept of idealistic generalisation – a metaphysical platonic ideal pure forms endeavour to achieve. This same idealist concept made it possible to use Modernism in different contexts, but was also the reason its promised democratic aspect failed. Today, we perceive with increasing clarity how complicated our society really is. Political crises of recent years show how impossible it is to subordinate diversity to an ideal system. Different images of what is happening in the world reach us through diverse information channels. During the Arab Spring social media was claimed to have helped justice to prevail, but it is increasingly clear that in one way or another all media is corrupt. The fantasy of an ideal metaphysical social order has been shattered. Instead we are putting our hopes on big data¹ – data collected automatically in real time promises to show the world as it really is. We should not slip into idealist generalisations, but the analysis of enormous quantities of data seems to be the final promise for identifying patterns in chaos – without generalisation. Digital technology reaches everywhere. In commerce, it goes without saying that statistics are gathered about how much, where and why something is bought, and by analysing this data design, production and logistics are optimised. Nowadays all objects to which enough data collecting technology is attached, are linked to the internet of things. In this way, our environment and the people and objects moving within it have become agents in large computational models. Collectable data is limitless and increasingly influencing every aspect of our lives. We could say that data-based adaptability, diversity and variability have become the typical features of the ruling ideology.

Post-digital architecture

After a short fling with Postmodernism, the digital architecture of the early 1990s with its smooth, seamless surfaces, could be considered a return to modernist aesthetics. With the help of calculus it is possible to express Postmodernist ideas through ideal forms. Contradictory external “forces” were smoothly folded into mathematical surfaces. Spline constructed surfaces are defined by algorithms that interpolate smooth curves between sets of points. The appearance of cloud computation, the internet of things and big data are taking their place in digital Postmodernism, characterised by fragmentation, plurality and density. Mario Carpo elaborates on this big data style² in this publication. The head curator of this year’s biennale Rem Koolhaas wrote about a similar tendency in Junkspace, “At the exact moment that our culture has abandoned repressive repetition and regularity as repressive, building materials have become more and more modular, unitary, and standardised; substance now comes predigitised […] Instead of trying to wrest order out of chaos, the picturesque is now wrested from the homogenised, the singular liberated from the standardised.”³ The ideological conflict here lies in the fact that attempts are made to build calculus based flowing forms from standard building materials. The logic of big data is based on the premise that nothing is infinitely seamless but on close inspection is always comprised of distinct parts. With the development of technology, architecture, over the last few years, has made increasing use of robotics. By using industrial robots some hope to achieve greater precision and capability, while others hope for greater integration between digital design and the end product. There are numerous different directions in this field. On one hand, robotic arms allow unprecedented precision, control and automation. ETH Zurich⁴ was one of the first universities where architects started experimenting with industrial robots for brick-laying – Gramazio;
Kohler’s Pike Loop represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 2008. The other direction, mainly propagated by Greg Lynn, is kinetic architecture. Lynn has said, “If I can take a ride in a driverless car on a public street, then I see no reason why my building can’t wiggle a little”.⁵ In this context the neo-materialist direction of Marjan Colletti, also an author represented in this publication, might be the most interesting one. While Carpo’s big data style is characterised by fragmentation, neo-materialism is about making the most of material properties. Materials science is developing rapidly and it can be assumed that in the near future our building materials will become increasingly smarter. Robotic design is closing the gap between digital and physical production. This method makes it possible to overcome the problem of translation between the digital and the physical. To physically produce seamless computer generated surfaces today, they need to be divided into infinitely small parts – the resolution needs to be increased. 3D printers only recognise straight lines, meaning that in order to achieve continuity and to make the end result look similar to the actual design, it is necessary to calculate as many points as possible on a surface and then print as thin layers as possible. By exploiting material properties such as plasticity or flexibility, it becomes possible to create “pure forms” in the way a glassblower or sculptor does and, therefore, to abolish the issue of resolution. The material itself becomes a part of the digital model; tits properties become variables in the algorithm. Only time will tell whether such methods will ever find widespread practical application or not. Both directions provide an answer to the quote from “Junkspace”. Materials are generally not homogeneous, therefore also their inner logic is fragmented and uneven. Even though Colletti does not talk specifically about style, it could be said that neo-materialism produces big data style. Ideologically these two are every different though. Carpo talks about big data style as something which should be fragmented and composed of infinitely small parts. But the neo-materialistic point of view coincides with Koolhaas’ one: it should be possible to create order from chaos – to include the material properties into design thinking and thereby lose matter’s subordination to digital thinking.

Transformation of the designer’s role

At least to the same extent that it is possible to see positive solutions from data analysis there are also dangers – big data is accompanied by the myth of truth. Information is one of the most powerful tools for manipulation and when it is backed by large amounts of data, it is difficult to argue against. Errors accumulate during collecting, recording, reading and processing – data has tolerances. A certain level of caution is necessary when working with it. In data-based architecture it is important to consider the aforementioned tolerances and maintain a critical attitude towards the resulting design. The architect as author is not going to disappear, even if there are hundreds of co-authors. But the open-endedness of big data will change the role of the architect. In the epilogue of his book “Alphabet and Algorithm” Carpo talks about split agency and differentiates between designers who design objects and are digital interactors and those who create objectiles⁶ and are digital designers. It is no longer enough for designers who use digital tools to use prewritten programs, because the program as a tool – stylus – has a stylistic limitation written into it. In the digital age the author is the one who creates the system, the final form of it is defined by the user. An example of this change in authorship is Frank Gehry’s company Gehry Technologies. A few years ago Andrew Witt, the former director of research at Gehry Tech, described their developing web platform. Ideally, a designer can upload a surface and see what it would look like made of different materials. All the necessary databases and algorithms are written into the system. It would be possible to calculate the stability of the construction, material quantities and cost, and then send an order to the appropriate company. At first glance, the system described by Witt seems like an innocent service. In reality, however, this system completely dictates the style of the end result. Architects who use this method merely become anonymous producers of surfaces on which the algorithms are run – this becomes crowdsourcing. With the arrival of Web 2.0 the principle of crowdsourcing has found much broader usage from the best known of cooperative projects like Wikipedia, which has completely replaced the traditional encyclopaedia, to product development and art projects. One of the first such product development projects was Threadless t-shirts. They created a web environment where people can upload designs, evaluate them and buy T-shirts with the most popular designs. Harper Reed, who was responsible for the technological aspect of the company, was the chief technology officer of Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. This is a powerful demonstration of the power of crowdsourcing on society. Even before the internet, urban planning took public opinion into consideration. With today’s tools this practice can only gain momentum, up to the point where voicing an opinion becomes direct participation. Christopher Hight and Chris Perry, the editors of the 2006 autumn issue of Architectural Design “Collective Intelligence in Design”, mention Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s vision of multitude, when talking about cooperative creation. For Hardt and Negri multitude is a political term, which I would rather not address here (but which is not entirely avoidable). From the data based design point of view though, the description of multitude becomes relevant. Hight and Perry interpret it in the following way, “’Multitude’ is a way of imagining the emergence of new forms of social, economic and political power enabled by the very same communication and information technologies, wherein a common space is constructed by linking an infinitely diverse set of individual interests[…]”⁷ In this vision there is an opportunity not to make generalisations. “Multitude” is not a simplification like “people”, which marks a uniform social body; it considers each individual. This theory is well suited to describing design in a networked data-society. In regard to the transformation of the designer’s role I would once again like to quote Carpo. He says, “For what is at stake today, and what may indeed be lost, is not The Author, as a timeless category of the spirit, but a very technologically specific kind of author. The falling star is, simply, the author of reproducible identical copies – a vast and influential category for sure, but not an indispensable one.”⁸

The exhibition

The Estonian pavilion “Interspace” is an open participatory system. The appearance of the space is evolving in time – each visitor is a digital interactor and creator of atmosphere in a specifically designed generic environment. The real-time interaction is differentiated in time and space – on the walls a field of pixels reacts in real time revealing fragmented bits of information, while the floor operates like an accumulative information gatherer and derivation field. The temporal differentiation allows the creation of an environment where people consume individual data-flows, while, at the same time leaving a sustained digital footprint of their activities in the room.
The system is not based on the amplitude but multitude – not the average, but the abundance of variations. The exhibition space is clearly polarised between two walls. One of them represents public space in its ideality of creation – from the perspective of the architect (the single author) and power. The other shows the reality of its use – from the perspective of the citizen (the collective author). The interspace constructed between the walls on the floor is a negotiation of the two – a space of split agency and authorial ambiguity – a model of contemporary public space. The fundamentals of public space have radically changed over the last 100 years, but true transformation has been brought about by digital culture. We can no longer talk about traditional squares and monuments as embodiments of modern ideology in the public space – our society is too complex and fragmented for this. If we, as architects, still want to be engaged in public space, we must find opportunities for including multitude.