Matthew Zbawiony
Professor MacPhail
ARCH 936 Thesis Prep II
11 October 2011
Revised Abstract
Our growing integration with and dependence on the virtual world in the 21st century calls into question the potential redundancy, obsolescence, and diminished nature of architecture’s social function. The emergence of Web 2.0 web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, collaboration, interoperability, and user-centered design help to augment existing social practices and foster a more global village in our faceless metropolises. Past influential organizations such as the Situationist International can help us understand ways in which contemporary architecture may be responsive to the culture of our times and our increasing synthesis with the digital world by turning its attention to one that is more ambiguous and fosters a sense of childlike playfulness. Current activities such as flash mobs and urban exploration are more easily facilitated by the virtual world and take advantage of existing spaces to modify them for their use. These activities can be traced back to the Situationist concepts of dérive, unitary urbanism, and the détournement that leads one to ask how these past ideas may be reinterpreted for use in our digital society.
The lack of interaction among people and anonymity we experience in cities stems in part from our increased mobility and transient nature is facilitates. Architects already design and build in the virtual world, a world in which the user creates all the rules, to simulate conditions in our physical world. The potential freedom from rules should question our prescriptive ideas about architecture (beyond those of living and work).
The Letterist Movement and the International Movement for An Imaginist Bauhaus joined together to form the Situationist International that combined ideas of reification and commodity from Lukacs and Marx, respectively. Their ideas gave rise to people such as Guy Debord, Constant Nieuwenhuys, and Giuseppe Gallizio that built on Huizinga’s theory of play. While most of the Situationist work is vague and without concrete solutions, Constant proposed an idea for a city of New Babylon. These aforementioned works should be examined for potential links to our present day. Two other Situationist-influenced writers, Tom McDonough and Libero Andreotti published works on “Situationist Space” and “Architecture and Play” which may solidify some of these ideas. While the previously mentioned work seen anti-capitalist in nature, the desired outcome from them rests only in understanding how spatial experiences may be framed in a society in which architecture may not be the primary means of promoting social function. This new interface, or dialogue between the physical and virtual worlds may rely more on a narrative. Architects such as Bernard Tschumi and Nigel Coates may researched to see how their claimed affiliation to the movement has influenced their work. A methodology should include personal interviews about what constitutes fun and what people have always been curious about exploring but have never acted upon.
Note: Constant’s New Babylon called for megastructures which joined together and its inhabitants gravitated from one leisure activity to the next. It rises over existing cities and its capitalist society. That’s too extreme for me. My interest lies in the modification of our built environment to include interventions in wich play is encouraged. Ideally its a mindset change to promote exploration of and re-use of spaces we typically don’t visit or occupy in an urban environment.
My abstract should have investigated existing typologies, their programmes, etc.
Expect the digital component posted in the AM.
