[p2p-research] Fwd: Adaptive Architecture, Collaborative Design, and the Evolution of Community

[Michel Bauwens]

Landmark essay by Eric Hunting on the future of 'P2P' Adaptive Architecture:
Adaptive Architecture, Collaborative Design, and the Evolution of
Community<http://p2pfoundation.net/Adaptive_Architecture%2C_Collaborative_Design%2C_and_the_Evolution_of_Community>,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Adaptive_Architecture%2C_Collaborative_Design%2C_and_the_Evolution_of_Community

intro and conclusion here:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 5:02 AM
Subject: Adaptive Architecture, Collaborative Design, and the Evolution of
Community
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
Cc: Mats Eriksson <mp_eriksson at yahoo.se>, Marcin Jakubowski <
joseph.dolittle at gmail.com>, Jeff Buderer <buderman at gmail.com>


Michel,

Here is the article you asked for on adaptive architecture for p2p
communities. I hope you find it interesting. And if you notice anything
needing some editing or improvement, feel free to point it out. I've ccd
this to those I seem to recall were in the earlier discussion. Please
forward if I've missed anyone.


Adaptive Architecture, Collaborative Design, and the Evolution of Community

There are many anachronisms relative to the contemporary situation
perpetuated today in the practice of architecture and two of the most
 obvious are the delusions of permanence and perfection; the notion that the
purpose of design is to realize some kind of ideal adaption relative to the
topography and situation of a site and as a consequence if design is proper
then the function of space need never change and structure will never go
obsolete. And, of course, the higher the 'profile' of the designer the
greater the tendency toward these assumptions of permanence and perfection.
the design becoming inviolate relative to the designer's prestige, changing
from architecture to sculpture.

In reality, we live in a world of change steadily increasing in pace and
degree. A world where the works of even history's greatest and most famous
architects are very routinely demolished and are lucky to survive a
generation. Western society is more mobile than ever before, property value
more volatile, and the structure and character of households more dynamic
and complex. The environmental effects of Global Warming alone will compel a
relocation of some two billion people in the coming decades. The effects of
rising, and increasingly volatile, energy costs and the need for nations to
reduce carbon footprints may double that number as once conventional modes
of living -like conventional suburbia- become untenable and people are
compelled to seriously consider the energy and carbon overheads of their
daily life. Currently, real estate market bubbles are bursting all over the
globe, forcing radical corrections of property value in the wake of decades
of irrational finance industry practice, casting people out of their homes
and compelling society to consider radical new ways of housing itself in the
face of unreliable, unsafe, and increasingly userous mortgage based systems.
Social trends have steadily increased the pace of home renovations. While
the market increasingly favors homes of generic aspect, homeowners are
increasingly demanding customization to suit a burgeoning diversity in
aesthetic taste and the structure of the family itself. The nuclear family
no longer defines the model household. New household models based on the
return of the extended family unit and the emergence of new non-related
family groups are emerging. And technology too is having its impact,
altering the architectures of domestic infrastructure systems with increase
frequency while producing new trends in work and leisure activity that can
radically effect the organization of the home and logistics of the
household. The past two decades have seen home design slowly adopt the
notion of the extra bedroom as optional 'home office' predicated on the
assumption that trends in home-based work favored the use of information
technology. And yet we are on the verge of a revolution in independent
industrial production and associated entrepreneurship that goes far beyond
the limits of a home office and which remains completely unanticipated in
home design even as designers themselves are leading this work trend.

Clearly, contemporary trends favor a habitat of more freely adaptive
architecture and nowhere is this need more acute than in the growing number
of intentional communities inspired by growing social dissatisfaction with
the dysfunctions of the contemporary habitat. Attrition rates for
intentional communities are typically high in the industrialized world owing
mostly to social issues; to unrealistic expectations, a lack of effective
social skills, sociopathic behavior patterns cultivated in the mainstream
habitat's anonymity, and an essential lack of cultural knowledge for what
community is and how it works. In the western world especially, generations
of Industrial Age development has cultivated an essential cultural
sociopathy rooted in the presumed inexorable logic of the Market.
Traditional communities were systematically destroyed in favor of an
isolated nuclear family unit identifying primarily with the macro-community
of the nation-state. The culture of community must be relearned through
trial and error and an incremental evolution, yet this is only possible in
an environment conducive to that process. An environment where concepts of
property and propriety are not presumed absolute and where the physical
structure of the habitat is not fixed and does not get in the way of, or
unnecessarily complicate, experimentation.

An important characteristic of vernacular architectures of the past was an
accommodation -indeed, an anticipation- of spontaneous adaptation.
Vernacular building technology is not the product of any formal development
process. It is the product of cultural evolution involving the peer-to-peer
negotiation between owner/builders and their community, owners and
craftsman, apprentice and master-craftsman, and the habitat, time, and the
environment. Together, these result in a system of building and design
convention peculiar to a location and regional culture. Today, they have
tended to become stratified as 'styles' in the modern era, their evolution
stunted by the compulsion toward 'cultural preservation' in the face of
contemporary nation-states compulsion toward sociocultural homogenization.
Many of their building methods are no longer functional or practical in the
contemporary context because of so many generations of stunted evolution,
missed technology integration, changing economics, and environmental
changes. They are mimicked for aesthetics alone. But for a long time they
embodied a very organic, collaborative, human process of habitat cultivation
-albeit operating at a pace measured usually in generations. Many have
sought to revive vernacular building techniques in an attempt to recapture
their organic collaborative qualities but long evolutionary stratification
has made many of them largely anachronistic and non-functional in a
contemporary context, particularly in terms of their labor overhead and thus
slow possible pace of evolution. Is it possible to invent a new vernacular
adapted to the contemporary situation exhibiting these same functional and
social qualities and serving as a medium of community cultivation? In this
article we will explore some of the new building technologies that hint at
this very possibility. Spontaneously adaptable building systems with quick
low-skill assembly and high technology integration that combine some of the
benefits of machine production and advanced technology with a potential for
the same organic cultivation of community design, now possible at an
unprecedented pace of evolution more in tune with the contemporary pace of
change.


Conclusions:

There is clearly great potential in adaptive architecture, not only in terms
of collaborative community development but also in terms of discrete
architecture and housing. Though most of the cultural knowledge associated
with traditional community development has been lost across the Industrial
Age, we see that some of the adaptive characteristics of past vernacular
building technologies has been retained or rediscovered in some contemporary
building systems, thanks largely to Modernists obsessions with modularity
and -ironically- the dream of industrialized housing. There are definitely
very important functional limitations in the contemporary technology of
adaptive architecture but in many ways they far surpass older vernaculars in
the ease and speed of potential evolution. Though many of the possible
technologies still remain too underdeveloped for practical use, what we have
at-hand today does seem suited to potentially supporting three different
scales of experimentation and exploration of peer-to-peer community
development. With Pavilion Architecture and Living Structures we have the
possibility for very low cost community experiments at a co-habitation scale
based on communal pavilion structures or repurposing a variety of commercial
and industrial buildings. With Container Module systems and perhaps
rudimentary purpose-built Modular Unit Architecture as well as contemporary
wood Post and Beam and T-Slot structures we can explore this at a co-housing
or village scale. And with purpose built Functionally Generic Architecture
based on conventional commercial construction, we can, in combination again
with the Living Structure approach, take this to a truly urban scale with
'microcities' or prototype arcologies. It would seem the only practical
obstacle to such experiments is people, given that the true start of any
such project is accumulating enough people with the necessary skills and
freedom of mobility to attempt such projects.

Of course, one could argue that many such experiments are already underway
around the world, being imposed by situation onto the various communities of
refugees and destitute of the world compelled into creating communities
ad-hoc without the benefit of any of these more sophisticated technologies.
It would seem, then, that there is great value in such purposeful
experiments not only as a means of exploring the social science of
collaborative community development but also in the cultivation of methods
and technologies that can be be shared with these new accidental
communities, giving them means of improving the odds of survival and quality
of life for those forced into such experiments by fate and social
indifference/injustice.

We have the means, even with so much knowledge lost and with such nascent
recent technology, to recapture much of the cultural skill set of community
we once sacrificed for the transient benefits of the Industrial Age. The
real technology for is the software we carry with us in our minds and
cultures. It has only been waiting to be re-expressed in new physical
mediums. The Modernists may have never dreamed of such things as they
explored what they thought was a future of modular technological building
efficiency but which was, in reality, a rediscovery of a mode of living most
ancient and very, fundamentally, human.

Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com




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