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Social Performativity – Architecture’s Contribution to Societal Progress
Patrik Schumacher, London 2019
Published in: The Routledge Companion to Paradigms of Performativity in Design and Architecture: Using Time to Craft an Enduring, Resilient and Relevant Architecture, Ed.Mitra Kanaani, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, New York & London 2020
Abstract:
Architecture is here theorized with respect to its contribution to societal progress, namely its performance regarding the innovative spatial ordering of increasingly complex cooperative social processes. Social ordering involves the aspects of coordination and control, respectively involving spatial integration and seclusion. As social processes become more divers, complex and intricate control must increasingly rely of self-control of increasingly free and self-directed actors. Accordingly the architectural ordering must increasingly shift its mode of operation from the use of controlling physical barriers to the use communicated thresholds. Architecture’s social performativity thus depends on the information-richness and communicative capacity of its products. This posits the task of designing the built environment as system of signification employing a designed spatio-visual language. Architectural semiology becomes the key to the upgrading of the discipline’s social performance. A particular design research project is presented to illustrate how architecture can perform as coordinated matrix of social communications.
Social Performativity as Demarcation Criterion
If performativity marks the demarcation of the design disciplines against the fine arts, then social versus technical performativity establishes the demarcation of the design disciplines – including architectural and urban design – against the engineering disciplines. The differentiation of design and engineering implies that of the three Vitruvian criteria of good architecture – firmness, commodity and delight – only the latter two are within the responsibility and expertise of architects and designers, while the first is an engineering matter. The third criterion – delight – refers to aesthetic valuation which is both relevant to art and architectural design, but not engineering. The responsibility for all technical performance aspects of the built environment has been completely taken up by various specialist engineering disciplines, both with respect to research-based innovation and professional delivery. What is left for architecture? The discipline and profession of architecture is responsible for the innovative delivery of the social purposes and performances of the built environment. Architectural design solutions then pose the downstream problems for engineering solutions. The ends-to-means hierarchy is clear.
Social versus technical performance thus demarcates architecture versus engineering. The general formula describing the built environment’s contribution to society’s functioning reads: Architecture orders social processes. Another way to express the same thesis reads: The societal function of architecture is the framing of social relations and communicative interactions. That the built environment accomplishes this as much via spatio-visual symbolic processes as via objective spatial relations is a further thesis posited and defended here.
The Vitruvian triad had led to a tripartite division of traditional architectural textbooks into respective parts on construction, distribution and decoration.
In the author’s systematic theory of architecture engineering and construction is left behind while distribution and decoration are re-formulated as architectue’s fundamental tasks of organization and articulation that together deliver the social performance of architecture, namely the ordering of social processes. Organization works via objective spatial relations like distances, adjacencies, conditions of access etc. Articulation is concerned with the perceptual tractability and the sematic encoding of architectural forms designating social situations. It is accordingly differentiated into phenomenological and semiological articulation. Phenomenology and semiology must become explicit agendas within the architectural discourse and within conscious design practice. The quest for upgrading architecture’s social performativity depends on the successful innovation of architectures organizational, phenomenological and semiological expertise.
Human Progress via Societal Progress
Our ancestors discovered, more by chance rather than by insight, that social cooperation and organisation beyond the small size of primate groups offer momentous productivity advantages that can make our path through the world much more secure, and potentially much more comfortable.
As Karl Marx already knew, the driving force of historical transformations are the productivity gains that accompany and indeed demand, for better or for worse, societal self-transformations within a competitive world economy. As Friedrich Hayek noted, competition is a search and discovery process. While the resultant evolutionary trajectories cannot be predicted more than a few years into the future, the inherent rationality of the competitive process as optimizing evolutionary process implies that change is for the better, at least for most, if not always at once for everybody. Ongoing cultural evolution implies that humanity as a whole enhances its material freedom, i.e. the collective capacity to “domesticate” the indifferent and often hostile physical universe, turning it into a serviceable, pleasurable “home”. Such a progressive trajectory is highly probable, if not guaranteed, albeit without any far-reaching predictability how this will be achieved, i.e. how these enhanced life forms will look like. Progress remains an adventure.
Productivity gains are not only the driving force but also the ultimately life-enhancing raison d’être of this evolutionary historical process. All human progress depends on productivity gains and is built upon productive cooperation on an ever larger scale of cooperative integration. This insight was clearly stated in Adam Smith who recognized that the division of labour is the key to the wealth of nations and that the division of labour could be all the more intricate and thus productive, the more the market is able to expand via trade. As Karl Marx stated “individual labour is productive only in these common labors which subordinate the forces of nature to themselves” and he noted in this connection that this communality is “represented by and concentrated in capital.” The great 20th century economist Ludwig von Mises spoke of the gains through cooperation as the ‘law of association’ or ‘law of society formation’ that explains the emergence of society and its expansion.
The chances for technological progress depend as much on the evolution of society as on the increase of knowledge which is itself always a social cooperative achievement. In turn the evolution of society depends upon the build-up of a congenial built environment as slowly evolving and stabilizing ordering matrix. There can be no social order without spatial order. The spatial manifestation and stabilization of social order and orderly social processes is indeed a vital and indispensable contribution that society receives from the built environment. Accordingly artificial built environments are a human universal. The built environment is a crucial part of the capital structure that according to Marx represents and concentrates human communality. However, in reference to Marx’s distinction of forces and relations of production, the built environment is as much a structure that reproduces social relations as it is an immediate component of society’s forces of production.
It is the built environment that provides societal evolution with the cross-generational, material substrate by means of which an advantageous social order can persist and grow. Human settlements form ever larger and more differentiated spatio-material structures, as the skeleton for increasingly complex social structures. Architecture’s most profound achievement is thus not the oft-invoked protection from the elements, but an organisational achievement: social order.
There can be no society without a built environment. Society can only evolve with the simultaneous ordering of space. The elaboration of a built environment (however haphazard, precarious, and initially based on accident rather than purpose and intention) is a necessary condition for the build-up of any stable social order. The gradual build-up of a social system must go hand in hand with the gradual build-up of an artificial spatial order; social order requires spatial order. The emergence of built environments as necessary substrate of any cultural evolution is thereby an indispensable factor of becoming human, i.e. of our escape from the animal kingdom. The social process needs the built environment as a plane of inscription where it can leave traces that then serve to build-up and stabilize social structures, which in turn allow the further elaboration of more complex social processes. The evolution of society goes hand in hand with the evolution of its habitat – understood as an ordering frame. This started with the temporary abodes or villages of hunter and gatherer communities, lead to the early cities of civilizations and still applies to the contemporary global metropolitan built environment.
Coordination and Control
Social ordering has two aspects that both involve architecture and that need to be distinguished: the aspect of social coordination and the aspect of social control.
Coordination is about the functional integration of various tasks and this requires that the various activities are inter-aware, can rely on each other and thus connect, concatenate and add up. This can be achieved via communication, contracts and rules like those that attach to property rights within market coordination or reporting protocols and rights of instruction within corporate or administrative hierarchies. The role of the built environment here is primarily informational, i.e. it communicates where which activity can take place and who is called upon and welcome to contribute or participate. It also often communicates the differentiation of social roles and their configuration within a structured interaction process as in a class room, board room or more complex, in a court room.
Control is about surveillance and the enforcement of rules of conduct, like property rules, the enforcement of contracts, and the supervision of the execution of instructions etc. The role of the built environment is here primarily physical, filtering access to variously designated and owned spaces via devices like fences, gates, walls, doors, locks, and via the strategic placement of surveillance points. The concealment and secure protection of private spaces also belongs to this architectural contribution to social control.
The necessity of social control is an ineradicable aspect of the human condition due to the possibility of defection and free-riding with respect to the burdens and benefits of the cooperative effort.
When the iconoclast Georges Bataille states that “the human order is bound up from the start with the architectural order which is nothing but a development of the former“ , he refers to social control rather than to social cooperation.
Freedom and Emancipation – Material and Social
Hegel’s philosophy of history famously identified increasing freedom as the direction and destiny of human history. In Hegels’s own words: “The final cause of the World at large, we allege to be the consciousness of its own freedom on the part of Spirit, and ipso facto, the reality of that freedom.” If the increase of freedom is indeed the trajectory of human history, then this is coherent with the evolution of life itself. According to the philosopher Daniel Dennett, freedom emerges in the evolution of living systems. The beginning of freedom of action of a living creature is foraging and to move out of harm’s way. The more moves the creature can make, i.e. the more degrees of freedom the creature acquires, but also the more these moves are related to information-based anticipations, the greater are the creature’s chances to persist and reproduce. Freedom is thus advantageous and therefore most sentient, mobile creatures instinctively cherish freedom and resist shackles and controls. However, the above caveat about information-based anticipations must be remembered also. It implies that regularity and thus predictability are advantageous environmental features. The instincts of domesticated animals adapt to their more controlled and more predictable environment. As Dennett reminds us, “in a totally chaotic, unpredictable environment, there is no hope of avoidance except sheer blind luck.”
Beyond free random exploration and immediate uninhibited reflexes it can be advantageous to build up complex chains of action that offer later but greater rewards. In human terms this is work, requiring self-control. Freedom must be coupled with foresight, and freedom to act crucially includes freedom to plan and prepare and indeed to labour so as to make the environment more hospitable and predictable. This implies the self-binding of actions as part of a planned, goal-oriented concatenation of actions. The freedom to act becomes the freedom to pursue projects.
The next step is the emergence of cooperative work and the realisation of the associated productivity gains. To secure these advantages requires both self-control and social control, i.e. a socially enforced restriction of individual freedoms.
The formation of ever larger societies with their attendant increase in social cooperation thus points the way towards greater emancipation from the burdens and threats of the physical world, thus representing a potential gain in physical freedom. However, societal organization also implies social rules and strictures that, at least prima facie, constrain freedom. These rules might be habitual, moral or legal. In any case, they seem to require a back stop back up via physical force.
We must distinguish material and social freedom. Material freedom, or prosperity, implies the increasing liberation from the material necessities and impositions of an indifferent physical universe. Social freedom, or liberty, implies the increasing liberation from the necessities of social discipline imposed by our cooperative conquering of material freedom. Material freedom trumps social freedom.
Because the hierarchical, disciplining forms of social organization and control that can enhance material freedom via productive social cooperation can also overshoot in unproductive ways, a new battle front for the striving of freedom has opened up: emancipation from unnecessary, unproductive societal strictures. Disputes about what constitutes necessary versus unnecessary, or even oppressive, societal restrictions have become a permanent part of the human condition and of our interminable striving for freedom. Our striving has thus become a complicated double agenda – physical emancipation and social emancipation – whereby the two sub-agendas often appear to conflict, with the additional complication that societal arrangements that seem globally advantageous are nevertheless differentially taxing to different members or groups within society. If we add to this the difficulties of transitioning from one societal regime to another, we can see the overwhelming difficulties that politics and political theory have to contend with. Global, sustainable freedom is thus hardly a simple matter. And yet, at the individual level it seems deceptively clear what would constitute an increase or decrease in one’s freedom. What is unclear is whether the desired freedoms can be generalized and made compatible with the socially produced material freedom.
At the frontier of human historical progress social emancipation is called for when technological advances allow for or require a new, possibly less restrictive regime of social control as a condition for the full development of the forces of production that becomes possible via the new technology. This might require a social revolution.
It is in the nature of the conditions for exercising effective social control that social power, and therefore also economic reward, is unevenly distributed. Most regimes of social control imply a stratified social order. This might lead to an overshooting of social control beyond what is macro-economically advantageous. The strata delivering social synthesis might become exploitative. Most of the large ancient stratified social orders – the ancient civilisations – included the institution of slavery and originated in armed conquests and continued to expand via armed conquests. Defensible city walls and fortresses belong to the primary architectural machinery until the advent of modernity.
However does the violent origin and maintenance of slavery imply that it was always and everywhere a form of parasitism? Or can certain historical forms of slavery be understood as mutualism with uneven distribution of burdens and benefits?
The use of force is not necessarily an indication that avoidable and condemnable exploitation is at play. Hierarchy and force might be necessary to maintain a social order that delivers a new level of material freedom for all or most. This depends: Was being a slave within civilisation advantageous over being free outside? Did slave populations reproduce and proliferate or did slavery depend on continuous conquest and fresh enslavement?
Serfdom under feudalism was for centuries, given the technological constraints of this era, probably without a better alternative in terms of the best feasible mix between material and social freedom. Recurring peasant revolts did not lead to a new social system until the advent of modernity. Karl Marx stated that “new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”
The hierarchy and discipline required to establish a productive cooperative social synthesis is hard to distinguish from predatory and exploitative-parasitic admixtures. Only a comparative analysis of different concurrent societies operating with historically given material technologies and the competition between these societies can distil and appraise this admixture of predation. Perhaps we can assume that the extensive time spans across which various human groups were experimenting with various forms of social order and regimes of control led to a nearly exhaustive search for humanly possible and economically most advantageous societal orders at each technological stage. The pervasiveness and duration of feudalism across cultures testifies to this. The continuous competition between various societies must have kept the ever latent possibility of predatory and exploitative forms of social control in check. Tyrants and tyrannies were kept in check by the example and relative long term prosperity of good and wise rulers and regimes operating with a broader participation in prosperity and with less harsh forms of domination and social control, i.e. without any significant, unnecessary, wasteful predatory admixture. We might introduce here the concept of historically necessary forms of social control. All forms of social control, at least until now, require the institutionalisation of legitimate physical force or violence, and the capacity of the built environment to physically constrain movement and access are an indispensable part of this.
It is the author’s hypothesis that the current level of technological and cultural development opens up the prospect of a fundamentally non-violent society with only non-violent means and mechanisms of social control. This would make the state, since Max Weber most succinctly defined via its territorial monopoly of violence, obsolete and the possibility of a state-less, anarcho-libertarian society becomes plausible. The investigation of the architectural implications of such a society and its spatio-morphological ordering requirements are one of the topics of this paper.
Futile Rebellions Against Architecture
In every society, even in a stateless society, or in a society without private property, territorial demarcations will be a necessary social ordering substrate via access and activity allocations with respectively restricted access and degrees of freedom. Architecture and freedom (just like society and freedom) are thus always already in tension. That is why radical non-conformists like the iconoclast philosopher Georges Bataille see architecture as prison, as the enemy.
Georges Bataille writes: “Architecture is the expression of the very being of societies, … that which orders and prohibits with authority, expresses itself in what are architectural compositions. … The storming of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of affairs: it is difficult to explain this impulse of the mob other than by the animosity the people hold against the monuments which are their true masters. … Moreover, the human order is bound up from the start with the architectural order, which is nothing but a development of the former. Such that if you attack architecture, whose monumental productions are now the true masters all across the land, gathering the servile multitudes in their shadow, enforcing admiration and astonishment, order and constraint, you are in some ways attacking man.”
The radical left wing architectural blogger and polemicist Léopold Lambert – the Funambulist – is building on Bataille’s anti-architecture and anti-establishment approach: “The line is architecture’s representative medium; it creates diagrams of power that use architecture’s intrinsic violence on the bodies to organize them in space. If the white page represents a given milieu — a desert, for example — when an architect traces a line on it, (s)he virtually splits this milieu into two distinct impermeable parts, and actualizes it through the line’s embodiment, the wall.” Architecture is identified with the physical operation of the wall as means of control and exclusion: “Each wall creates social conditions on both of its sides: the included and the excluded. One can only be homeless (‘prisoner of the outside’) if there is something called home.” As with Bataille the prison becomes the paradigm case for architecture’s social mode of operation: “There is a violence inherent to architecture, which is then necessarily instrumentalized politically: the way we normally build walls is to resist the energy of the body. We then invented devices like doors—a regulator of the wall porosity—and keys, which allow us to establish who can get past architecture’s violence and who cannot. Now, who gets access to the instrument that can transform a regular house into a prison cell is political, but it is not architectural per se to say who gets the key.”
If civilisation depends on architectural ordering, it can’t all be summarily dismissed. Therefore we must introduce the distinction between good and bad ordering, good and bad “violence”. Lambert can avoid this because all the examples and topics he engages with in his blog are extreme or exceptional situations like (suppression of) protests, oppressive social exclusion of marginal groups, war, occupation (as in Gaza) etc., where, especially from a left wing perspective, good vs bad, friend vs enemy in terms of oppressed and oppressor, can be taken for granted without being problematized. So here all architectural “violence” seems obviously bad and is indeed often associated with real violence in the ordinary sense of the word. But on this basis a general theory of the emancipatory or oppressive effects of forms of architectural order cannot be forthcoming.
No doubt, we are bodies and architecture sometimes physically orders and channels us. But that’s only one aspect of architecture’s social functioning: it also functions as ordering matrix for self-directed browsing and self-sorting. And more importantly, it operates also via thresholds and demarcation lines that do not constitute physical barriers at all, but rather function like signals, indications, and indeed communications. Here architecture works and orders via its information-richness and communicative capacity rather than as if channeling cattle as the prison paradigm suggests. Thus the ‘hard’ architectural ontology of walls, fences, locked gates etc. should be de-emphasized and replaced by a ‘soft’ ontology of expressive thresholds, indications, and atmospheres that operate semiologically as guiding orientations, invitations and priming characterisations, in short as language rather than as physically operating apparatus of exclusion.
As violence proper recedes and altogether disappears in the advanced arenas of world society, so does the predominance of physical barriers as spatial ordering mechanisms. Their gradual disappearance from architecture and their substitution by informational architectural operations is a clear sign of societal progress and constitutes a compelling productivity boosting advantage for those institutions that push forward along this trajectory. The simultaneity of inter-aware offerings, the light-footedness of switching between activity and interaction modes, the overall intricacy and dynamism of the cooperative process that motivates the co-location in the first place are all striking advantages of an informational spatial order – which we might term ‘soft order’ – over its physically segregating nemesis ‘hard order’.
The essential advantage of a soft architectural order, whether determinate or indeterminate, is that it builds on the freedom of self-directed individuals. A second major advantage is that the absence of physical separations via walls allows for an unprecedented density of simultaneous, inter-visible communicative offerings. This makes the construction of a new kind of space possible: the space of simultaneity. The new tropes and design moves of parametricism like overlap, interpenetration of domains, field conditions with gradient transformations cannot be realized with the crude tool of walls acting as physical barriers. The intricate complex orders of parametricism are thus premised on social formations where physical social control, especially social control via physical violence, has been replaced by a reliance on self-control, perhaps in connection with forms of electronic monitoring.
The Built Environment as Societal Information Process
The spatial order of the human habitat is both an immediate physical organizing apparatus that separates and connects social actors and their activities, and a material substrate for the inscription of an external ”societal memory.” These ”inscriptions” might at first be an unintended side effect of the various activities. Spatial arrangements are functionally adapted and elaborated. They are then marked and underlined by ornaments, which make them more conspicuous. The result is the gradual build-up of a spatio-morphological system of signification. Thus, a semantically charged built environment emerges that provides a differentiated system of settings to help social actors orient themselves with respect to the different communicative situations constituting the social life-process of society. The system of social settings, as a system of distinctions and relations, uses both the positional identification of places (relative location) and the morphological identification of places (ornamental marking) as props for the societal information process. Compelling demonstrations for this formative nexus between social and spatial structure can be found within social anthropology, attesting to the crucial importance of cross-generationally stable spatio-morphological settings for the initial emergence, temporary stabilization and further evolution of all societies. Only on this basis, with this new material substrate upon which the evolutionary mechanisms of mutation, selection, and reproduction could operate, was the evolution of mankind out of the animal kingdom, and all further cultural evolution, possible. Thus, the built environment, as the cross-generationally stable, material substrate of the cultural evolution, acts functionally analogous to the DNA as the material substrate of evolution.
Architecture’s social functionality resides to a large extent in its communicative capacity. The built environment orders social processes through its pattern of spatial separations and connections that in turn facilitates a desired pattern of separate and connected social events. This is social organization via spatial organization. However, it is important to reflect that the functioning of the desired social interaction scenarios depends on the participants’ successful orientation and navigation within the designed environment. The built environment, with its complex matrix of territorial distinctions, is (or should become) a giant, navigable, information-rich interface of communication.
The artificiality and communicative capacity of human settlements, artefacts and dresses becomes tangible when we compare the diversity of human visual-material cultures, analogous to the diversity of human languages, each with its own rich internal differentiations, with the visual uniformity of other primate species.
What sets human groups apart from other primates is what we might at earlier times, in the broadest sense, have called art, and what we should now refer to as design. This includes profane and sacred buildings and places, tools and other artefacts, as well all the artistry of decorative self-transformation via dress, jewelry, and make-up. These practices of “artistic” self-transformation are a universal phenomenon of all human groups.
These practices of decoration also include all buildings and artefacts, i.e. in contemporary terms they include all design disciplines. The significance of these practices, then and now, is the visual marking and thereby conspicuous differentiation of social arenas, roles and identities without which no social order can be built up or maintained. These props and marks allow dominance hierarchies, as well as more complex societal differentiations, to be institutionalized. The social order becomes independent of the continuous combative physical reestablishment of hierarchy and this way also becomes scalable. Design is involved in the elaboration and reproduction of these vital semiological systems.
Built environments started to become designed environments since the Renaissance when architecture first emerged as a consciously innovative, theory-led academic discipline and profession in distinction from the craft of construction.
The transference of the built environment’s evolution from incremental in situ improvements to comprehensive design speculation via complete sets of drawings and perspectival simulations led to a momentous acceleration of this evolution. However, societal evolution as a whole was still comparatively slow and the complexity of social institutions remained modest enough to be grasped via schedules of accommodation and controlled via a set of static plan descriptions. This started to change during the second half of the 20th Century and increasingly so since the 1980s. The increasingly complex and dynamic processes of social interaction within advanced contemporary knowledge economies can no longer be anticipated via schedules of accommodation nor evaluated via the scrutiny of plan lay-outs. The only hope for the architectural design profession to regain its competency, i.e. a measure of anticipatory control over the social performance of buildings, is via agent-based occupancy and life-process simulations.
However, to recuperate the architect’s competency on the new level of complexity and dynamism of contemporary social processes it is not enough to rely on the crowd simulations developed so far by fire and traffic engineers. In contrast to engineers, architects must reckon with architecture’s users not merely as physical bodies but as perceptually orienting, socialized actors who navigate a space encoded with social meanings. Accordingly the designer must start to work explicitly as much on the symbolic inscription of action protocols as on the physical accommodation of activities.
The functions of architecture are now parametrically variable event scenarios. Their accommodation requires the design and application of a system of signification, and their testing requires agent-based life-process modeling with socially differentiated agent populations that read their behavioral options out of the information-rich environments designed in accordance with a semiological code. The development of this new, enhanced level of competency is the aim of the author’s design research programme which he termed ‘agent-based parametric semiology’. This paper outlines this research programme and illustrates some of the work in progress.
Agent-based Parametric Semiology
The research programme of ‘agent-based parametric semiology’ operates within the theoretical framework laid out in the author’s ‘The Autopoiesis of Architecture’ and proposes a new design and simulation medium for the operationalization of the semiological project within architecture. It is at the same time the project that promises to upgrade architecture’s capacity to predictably deliver an enhanced social performativity to designed and built environments, in line with the demands made by an increasingly complex and dynamic societal process.
The initial premise posits that spatial communication in the service of the spatial ordering and framing of social interaction processes is architecture’s core competency. The built environment’s social performance depends on its communicative capacity. The elaboration of spatial complexes in accordance with a designed semiological code is thus a key to upgrading architecture’s core competency. The semiological project implies that the design project systematizes all form-function correlations into a coherent system of signification, designed as a network of similitudes and contrasts, organized via a spatio-visual grammar. Each territory is a communication. It communicates an invitation to participate in the framed social situation. To enter the territory implies an acceptance of its spatial communication and the act of entering thus communicates one’s willingness to participate in the respective interaction scenario. Everybody who enters is expected to adopt the behavioural rules implied. That’s the point of all signification: the coordination of behaviours facilitating cooperation. The precise characterization of the situation depends upon the orchestration of the various semiological registers that come together in the articulated territory: its position in the overall matrix of territories, its spatial shape, its tectonic and material articulation etc. The articulate territory might thus be designed according to a ‘grammar’ as a well-formed combination of sign radicals. The build-up of a spatio-visual grammar affords a momentous combinatorial enhancement of architecture’s versatility of expression. A small vocabulary might afford a vast number of different communications.
The meaning and effect of the designed architectural code becomes manifest via agent-based life-process simulations. Autonomous agents are set up with action menus, decision processes (decision trees) and utility functions. The agent’s actions and behavioural rules are made dependent on the configurational and morphological features of the environment designed in accordance with the semiological code. The programmed agents respond to and modulate their behavior in relation to environmental clues. Spatial position, form parameters, colour, texture, and stylistic features, together with ambient parameters (lighting conditions) constitute and characterize designated territories and lead agents to select specific behavioural modes and thus result in different collective event patterns. Since the ‘meaning’ of an architectural space is the type of event or social interaction to be expected within its territory, this implies that the meaning of the architectural language can enter the design medium (digital model) via such crowd modelling. Thus these new tools allow for the re-foundation of architectural semiology as agent-based parametric semiology.
The semiological code works if the programmed social agents consistently respond to the relevantly coded positional and morphological clues so that expected behaviours can be read off the articulated environmental configuration. The meaning of architecture, the prospective life processes it frames and sustains, is modelled and assessed within the design process, thus becoming a direct object of creative speculation and cumulative design elaboration. The upgraded form of crowd modelling that makes agent behaviours dependent on the socially encoded (rather than merely physical) environment is the decisive step from the engineers’ crowd modelling focussing on circulation to a generalized life-process modelling capturing the spatio-semiotic frame dependency of all social interaction processes between co-present actors.
The first and best test case for this new approach and potentially compelling new design service is the domain of corporate space planning where users’ lives are integrated and cooperative rather than mere parallel lives. The key reason for gathering large groups in corporate headquarters is the garnering of synergies: The key task is to turn this expansive co-presence into a comprehensive inter-awareness, for the sake of an intensified information and knowledge exchange, and to facilitate extensive horizontal cooperation within and across departments and projects.
Agent-based parametric semiology and life process modelling can thus become a compelling methodology for data-driven design focussing on skill synergies and knowledge exchange.
How can we make credible, verifiable operational steps towards the goal of spatial optimization with respect to knowledge exchange? Once we have established a method of spatial articulation that sustains visual orientation and facilitates quick navigation, we can use agent-based life-process modelling to test and compare distribution scenarios with respect to the emergent patterns of interaction. We can also simulate collaborative clustering scenarios in situations where more freedom and mobility is given to employees to self-organize, as in so called ‘activity-based’ office environments for ‘agile’ working.
The agent population will be differentiated according to relevant categories and according to multiple (weighted) project affiliations and/or disciplinary affiliations using social network analysis tools. This agent differentiation will have to be calibrated by client-specific data about the people that will work in or visit the space. Agent behaviours are set up to be context dependent, i.e. vary with the designation and social character of the spaces. The simulations will allow us to extract important measures like overall encounter frequency, encounter frequency within groups and across groups, within hierarchical strata and across strata, frequency of communicative interactions of various types, probability of larger communicative cluster formation etc. These measures will be used as evaluation criteria in the comparative testing and gradual improvement of the simulated spatial organization, i.e. of the lay-out and distribution scenarios. We would also be able to compare different semiological designs with different degrees of information-richness, spatially embedding more or less order and co-ordination. The same applies to scenarios of responsive environments where the spatial communications become dynamic. In this way we can start to get a handle on what the various design choices imply for the design’s ultimate criteria of success in terms of productivity enhancing space planning.
Merely intuitive appraisals have little chance on their own to give credible guidance at the scale and complexity of large corporate headquarters with often hundreds or even thousands of employees, and by extension even less chance when it comes to larger urban processes where multiple institutions and entrepreneurial offerings look for architectural expert advice in their search for synergies that draws them together in our increasingly dense urban centres in the first place. That’s why it is justified to put a veritable refoundation of the discipline on the agenda: architecture and urban design as agent-based parametric semiology.
The Design of a Spatio-visual Semiological System
For our academic design research studies we chose programmes such as a university campus or a corporate campus for tech firms like google, and innovative work environments in general, as initial design research arena for the semiological project. These are the high performance arenas at the most advanced frontier of our civilisation where the new productivity potentials of our post-fordist epoch are explored and pushed forward. Architecture’s innovations must be relevant and congenial to these arenas. It is here that the complexity of social processes is most expressed, where communication is most intense and dynamic, where divers human actions and interactions are integrated in intricate patterns of cooperation rather just run in parallel. In contrast, retail or residential arenas are much simpler, and less integrated, i.e. they accommodate parallel rather than integrated lives and thus, as it were, operate by addition rather than multiplication. The next decision was to privilege interior over exterior spaces. While urban fabrics matter, it is in the interior where the most important and most intricate social interactions reside.
As example of a semiologically conceived architectural project we would like to present a recent student project developed by Yihui Wu, Lei Wang, and Yanling Xu under the guidance of Patrik Schumacher and Pierandrea Angius at the Design Research Laboratory of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. The semiological design research project crucially includes the design of a spatio-visual language, i.e. the design of a semiological system or system of signification, with explicit vocabulary and grammar. The particular design project is then understood as only one among many possible applications or “utterances” of the designed language.
All semiological design must proceed by means of building up two correlated systems of distinctions, the system of signifiers or symbols and the system of signifieds or meanings. This focus on system and distinction is crucial and was first emphasized by the founder of semiology, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. All terms are relative and acquire their meaning only in distinction and relation to the other terms. A language operates always on the basis of a total system of distinctions “in which all the elements fit together, and in which the value of any one element depends on the simultaneous coexistence of all the others”. In the design of a semiological system the distinctions in the domain of the signifiers are to be correlated with the distinctions in the meaning domain. In the case of architectural semiology the domain of the signifier is the world of architectural forms, i.e. the spaces and their defining components or properties, and the domain of the signified is the world of varied possible social situations to be accommodated. The project presented here proposes a work environment for a start-up incubator. In such buildings very many different social situations must be distinguished and therefore many different spaces must be differentially characterized. Each space within the total manifold of spaces is defined by a particular combination of aspects. The design of each individual space therefore involves a number of appropriate selections from the articulation options made available by the language via its vocabulary and grammar. The vocabulary is ordered into categories, or substitution classes, or registers of semiological encoding: location, spatial shape, boundary type, colour, material etc. These registers correspond to meaning dimensions within which the intended aspects of the social situation can thus be selected: destination vs circulation, business vs socializing, work vs meet, public vs private, allocated vs bookable etc.
The first distinction we might introduce to explain the designed system is the formal distinction between bound vs unbound spaces. To this form distinction on the signifier side corresponds, on the side of social meaning, the distinction between business spaces and leisure spaces. This formal distinction carries the further functional meaning of destination vs circulation space. Within the bounded business spaces we introduce the subsidiary distinction of convex vs concave spaces, designed to encode the social distinction between work spaces and meeting spaces.
Fig.1 Dictionary of Spatio-visual vocabulary: Two hierarchically ordered distinctions in the register of spatial shape: the spatial distinction bound vs unbound signifies the social distinction business vs leisure. Within the bound spaces the spatial distinction convex vs concave signifies the social distinction meeting vs working.
The posited distinctions, both the distinction bound/unbound as well as distinction convex/concave, are rather abstract and therefore allow for a lot of variation in shape and size without thereby infringing on the distinctive meanings preserved across all the possible variations. This is indicated in the small diagrammes at the bottom. This abstractness allows for parametric variation, in line with the requirements of parametricism. We might therefore talk about “parametric semiology”.
Now we introduce two further distinctions that both cut across the previously introduced distinctions as well as cutting across each other. Both meeting and work spaces might be private, semi-private, or public, respectively represented via thick boundary, dashed boundary or thin boundary. Public work/meet areas might be WeWork-style co-working areas. Private areas belong to particular start-up companies. Colour, grey vs white, further encodes allocated vs bookable spaces. The matrix indicates that the choices offered by these distinctions are freely combinable. Of course it must be checked if all possible combinations make sense on the meaning side. If not, then restrictions on free combination must be introduced. Such restrictions or their absence, i.e. the regulation of sign-radical combinations, are determined in the grammar of the language.
Fig.2 This matrix shows how three distinctions can combine to produce 12 different expressions.
We can see here how grammar-based languages operate by multiplication, by exploiting the proliferation of expressive power due to the power of combinatorics. The system of three distinctions offers here the expression of 12 different messages. If we would include the bound/unbound distinction in this game of combination we would arrive at 24 expressions.
Another aspect of the paradigm of parametric semiology is the readiness to consider that distinctions might be introduced not as strict dichotomies but as a gradient spectrum of options defined by two poles. Formally this can be achieved by “inbetweening” or “morphing” between the two poles of the spectrum. However, this operation makes only sense if we can meaningfully conceive of a corresponding gradient in the domain of social meaning. Within contemporary work dynamics such a spectrum of situations between a clear cut meeting situation on the one hand and a clear cut concentrated individual work situation on the other hand could indeed make sense. If we assume a gradation into 8 grades and combine these 8 choices with the two new distinctions introduced above we arrive at 96 choices offered by working with only three distinctions.
Fig.3 Parametric Semiology: The dichotomy of convex vs concave is transformed into a continuous spectrum of shapes defined between the two poles with a continuum of shapes that are more or less convex or concave.
As indicated above, the grammar of a language regulates the combination of sign-radicals into full signs as well as regulating the combination of multiple signs into a larger communication or overall text. It is therefore required to design and thus decide on the syntactic rules for combining signs and related semantic rules about how the combination of sign-radicals or signs should be read to determine the overall meaning of the combined signs. It can be expected that the downstream combination of the designed vocabulary might create problems and is thus constraining and feeding back into the design of the vocabulary. The diagrammes here test the possibility of combing work and meeting spaces and show that the convex meeting spaces can and should nestle into the concave niches provided by the working spaces. Further adjacent work spaces are expected to similarly interlock. We can thus posit the grammatical rule of nesting spaces.
Fig.4 Grammar of nesting spaces: The vocabulary of concave and convex spaces lends itself to the organisation of efficient aggregations. Nesting also indicates that spaces belong together.
Within contemporary architecture, since deconstructivism, it is possible and often advantageous to allow for territories to overlap. As social complexity and communicative intensity increases it becomes increasingly problematic to restrict the spatial organisation of social processes to neatly separated zones. Rather than jumping from this order of zoning to a disordered condition where everything mixes everywhere, it is advantageous to allow for the determinate allocation and articulation of zones where particular social functions and their respective territories can overlap. The accommodation of this possibility is a recurring feature of parametric semiology. There is no guarantee that any given vocabulary can support the meaningful and coherent articulation of overlap conditions. The vocabulary introduced here does allow for the articulation of overlap, while maintaining a coherent system of signification. The overlap of two concave, amoeba-like work spaces might generate either a new concave work space, i.e. where two work groups might collaborate in a dedicated collaboration zone, or might generate a new convex space as shared meeting space that then conspicuously belongs to both work spaces that overlap there. The overlap between a concave work zone and a convex meeting zone generates a new convex meeting space. This can make sense when a meeting space that belongs to a particular work group is at the same time characterized as belonging to a larger meeting zone.
Fig.5 Grammar of overlap conditions: Two concave work zones generate a new concave work space which belongs to both. Alternatively they might generate and overlap in a shared convex meeting space. A Work zone and a meeting zone can only generate a new meeting space. These results make sense and are coherent with the initial definitions.
The next move is building up the complexity of the semiological system tackles the initial distinction between bound and unbound spaces. This distinction is a dichotomy which with a clear cut criterion: a bounded space is enclosed by a boundary. The unbounded space is the continuous space that flows between these bounded spaces. This criterion still holds in case of a long, meandering boundary line, as long as it eventually closes the loop. However, this distinction can be made ambiguous, and turned into an ordered spectrum distinguishing degrees of boundedness. On the one side of the spectrum the distinction is clear and crisp as bounded spaces are indeed always fully closed. However, spaces might be defined that are very similar to fully bounded spaces where the boundary loop nearly closes, but leaves a small gap. These gaps might gradually increase and the distinction between bounded and unbound spaces becomes increasingly blurred. On the meaning side this can be interpreted as follows: the distinction between business spaces for formal collaboration and spaces for socialising is getting blurred. A field that offers many such inbetween situations might be desirable and conducive for informal communication and collaboration.
Fig.6 Gradient Field Condition: The dichotomy of bound vs unbound spaces is gradually dissolved moving from west (left) to east (right). The distinction between work and meet is being maintained as the distinction between business and socialising communication is being increasingly blurred.
The project utilizes this possibility offered by the semiological system. In particular, it does so by arranging the spaces in such a way that an east to west vector of gradual transformation emerges whereby the distinction between bound and unbound spaces which is very crisp at the western end of the space gradually dissolves as we move eastwards. This implies that the morphological encoding of the difference formal/informal business is redundantly over-coded by the locational encoding. Such redundancies are a useful option in cases where messages deserve to be reinforced because they might otherwise be overlooked or where messages are important and thus deserve emphasis via duplication. The model displays a further redundancy: the gradient from the zone with the crisp bound/unbound dichotomy to the blurred condition is once more reinforced by a gradient treatment of the contrastive colour distinction which gradually disappears as we move into the blurred condition. In turn, the ordered gradient spectrum also offers locational information and thus also operates as effective navigation aid.
Fig.7 The Field three-dimensionally articulated and furnished. The bound-unbound west-east gradient is redundantly over-coded via the gradual dissolution of the light-dark colour contrast.
Fig.8 & Fig.9 Detailed three-dimensional articulation of the blurred end of the gradient spectrum. The boundary itself is dissolving while the distinction between working and meeting holds fast.
In the further detailing of the three dimensional articulation of the scheme the boundary lines themselves blur and turn from platform edges and walls more and more into relief-like stepping edges as we move into the blurred zone and as the closure of these lines diminishes. Thus users gain multiple local morphological clues that tell them where in the spectrum from formal to informal they are located. As the detailed model shows, the distinction between working and meeting zones can also, to some extent, be maintained in the informal, blurred zones.
Finally, the semiological system also encompasses and makes semiological use of the furniture as well as of the ceiling and lighting design. The design succeeds in reusing the correlation of the convex/concave distinction with the meet/work distinction on the furniture scale. The ability to reuse distinctions in this way is of course elegant and advantageous and makes the overall language cognitively less taxing. Also, the choice of forms has been motivated here by considerations of pragmatic social functionality. Convex tables and convex spaces make sense as meeting tables and spaces. Serendipitously, its opposite, the concave or convoluted, meandering form is viable for both work tables and work zones.
Fig.10 & Fig.11 The distinction of meet/work via the difference convex/concave is being re-applied on the level and scale of the furniture.
Fig.12 The crisp, formal, dichotomous end of the space in 1st person perspective
Fig.13 The blurred, informal end of the space in 1st person eye-level perspective.
This example shows that while signifiers, with respect to their communication function, can in principle be chosen arbitrarily, this is not always possible or advisable in architectural semiology. Here the domain of the signifier is indeed often pre-constrained to the range of forms that are pragmatically viable for the purposes they are to signify . What we further witnessed here is that the relative arbitrariness or degrees of freedom that exist at the outset when starting to design a semiological system become increasingly constrained by what has already been stipulated . We should expect that architectural codes, just like verbal languages, expand their vocabulary by analogical extension rather than by arbitrary invention.
This example is meant to illustrate how a relatively complex and nuanced semiological project can be step-wise elaborated on the basis of an integrated, systematic series of simple and intuitive form-function or form-meaning correlations. It serves here as initial illustrative glimpse into the ambitious project of a generalized architectural semiology.
The research project of testing these complex, information-rich designs via agent-based life-process modelling runs in parallel with the creative elaboration of pertinent design languages. Together these two strands of design research serve to upgrade the discipline’s capacity to enhance and verify the social performance of the built environment.
End.
Credit for illustrations:
Yihui Wu, Lei Wang and Yanling Xu under the guidance of
Patrik Schumacher and Pierandrea Angius at the Design Research Laboratory (AADRL),
Architectural Association School of Architecture, London 2018
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