The Open Phenomenon and Lessons for Architecture
Future Practice Submission
Autumn Term 09/10
High Pass
The Open Phenomenon and Lessons for Architecture
Fabrizio Matillana
Diploma 14
Tutors:
Peter Thomas
Hugo Hinsley
ABSTRACT
This essay aims to discuss the possibilities to draw from open technology and open-source design techniques of organisation into the architectural project. In particular I will look at the relationship between education and open learning and the impact or lack of it has in contemporary campuses and the potential it gives to future planning of new educational institutions.
OPEN-NESS in Architecture
This essay will discuss the factors and implications open technologies have in the emergence of an open culture and how education is responding to the challenges of an open learning revolution. In particular, the effect these issues have in architectural culture, whether in the utilisation of the principles of openness in architectural practice or of the principles of openness in architectural built space. Examples will be drawn from practices where the built environment is unable to contain the very forces acting within the buildings it means to harbour, as a twofold revolution takes place: a social and technological revolution and a revolution in building design. The continuing expansion of information technology interconnecting educational institutions with potential learners outside of its physical premises far outstretches any physical attempt to contain these forces.
“Moore’s Law[1], which says that the power of integrated circuits doubles every 18 months, now applies to goods in all fields.” [2] The digital interconnection this is allowing and instantaneity in communication has brought upon a culture of openness, where the dissemination of information has settled a democratization of data as a new ideal to aspire, beyond the restraints of copyright and profit. The context of what is dubbed “knowledge economy”, John Seely Brown describes it more as a knowledge ecology. It is in this ecology in which open culture and the possibility for an open architecture coexist:
Just as no one manages the Internet, no one can manage a knowledge ecology. But we can understand the working principles of our communities, adapt our roles to be more effective, and improve the tools that support creativity. In the knowledge economy, therefore, management gives way to mission. It is people’s commitment to the continuous generation of knowledge that gives life to the communities on which we all depend.[3]
There is one myth in open source that has to be quickly addressed:
“A common observation made by those sceptical of the open educational technology movement is, “you get what you pay for.” The implication is that products developed without the benefit of sustained commercial investment, and lacking the control structures and accountability identified with centralized, for-profit incentives, will be certain to disappoint.” [4]
Nowhere is this more relevant that in computational sciences, in particular Linux. I will make a detour from the specific academic context this essay will operate in to bring into consideration the principle of openness as developed in the Linux example. Linus Torvalds, strated the Linux kernel and is now a model of portability across various computer platforms. The success of Linux and its wide spread portability is due to not focusing on conventional research done at the 60s, when Torvalds was writing Unix code, that dictated that portability would derive the microkernel-style architecture, that is “[an abstraction of] details of process control, memory allocation, and resource allocation so that a port to another chipset would require minimal changes.”[5] On the contrary, Torvalds points out that “the idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast – the kernel – is inherently counter-productive”[6] Hence, his aim in looking at writing Linux not to be portable to any architecture and in application, resulting being entirely compatible. Torvald explains:
“The Linux kernel isn’t written to be portable to any architecture. I decided that if the architecture is fundamentally sane enough, and follows some basic rules then Linux would fundamentally support that kind of model. For example, memory management can be very different from one machine o another. I read up on the 68K, the Sparc, the Alpha, and the PowerPC memory management documents, and found that while there are differences in the details, there was a lot in common in the use of pacing, caching, and so on. The Linux kernel memory management could be written to a common denominator among these architectures, and then it would not be so hard to modify the memory management code for the details of a specific architecture.”[7]
The Linux example is a key moment in understanding the notion of open softwares and how it’s meant to develop from, rather than aiming to design universality, appropriate concepts that are already successful and practically running and derive a common language. Architecture seems to be in a quest for perpetual reinvention and designing “the new” with each brief and, it is Torvalds’ more modest goal that achieved true portability, within the computer operating systems.
The common grounds on which open-source relies, just as the basic architecture of programming underlines, is key in the portability of the concept and to its success, just as Linux demonstrated. However, for the success of commonality, sharing is paramount, and the combination of commonality and open source has been lead by Ubuntu[8]. However, on the digital realm, this openness has inaugurated a communication culture that has also been incorporated by architectural practice. Ubuntu from Canonical is one of such free softwares that have created a community that pursue openness in information. Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu operating system, an open source operating system that is free has been widely been accepted as an alternative to Microsoft’s profit driven enterprise, where, governments in Europe have started to opt for the alternative operating system precisely due to its zero price and its increasingly streamlined interface rivalling Windows:
“The Macedonian education department relies on Ubuntu, providing 180,000 copies of the operating system to children, while the Spanish school system has 195,000 Ubuntu desktops. In France, the National Assembly and the Gendarmerie Nationale, the military police force, rely on Ubuntu for a combined 80,000 PCs. “The word ‘free’ was very important,” said Rudy Salles, vice president of the assembly, noting that it allowed the legislature to abandon Microsoft.”[9]
The community based approach from Ubuntu is one that relies on the formation of relationships that sustain the dependency on the overall community rather than on direct profit by the distribution of a product. The same model has been applied in other open practices that connect people within a community of shared principles and provide a communal service that is financed by the continual reliance on the base network. Just as Ubuntu free approach is key in its philosophy and one of its competitiveness trademarks, the distribution of this software is a viable option for countries and regions of the world without the resources to pay for the full laptop service with operating system. The one laptop per child program to a great extent owes to its reduced fee to open source software as the majority of the price the average customer walking down Tottenham court road pays for a laptop is including the price for the operating system. The opens-source community doesn’t rely on direct profit making, but on the formation of the community, of an audience, which is advantageous to people with less resources. That same principle is applied in Architecture for humanity: an open source based approach to architectural professionals.
Cameron Sinclair founded Architecture for Humanity[10] in 1999. It is an example of a community that seeks to provide free serve and sustain via consultation and donations[11]. The NGO structure and the broad community driven approach and the involvement of professionals in design and construction issues throughout the world guarantees the appeal and success of Architecture for Humanity.
The liaison between professionals fro various parts of the world is a key aspect in open culture and only possible with the advent of the internet and consolidated with the increased speed in digital communications, yet, does not translate yet in architectural built space. To see at potential methods that would affect the way architecture is designed, with an open culture agenda; I will focus more in detail on open education and its impact in the higher education. The relationship between the university and education has had always been a consistent reproduction of new buildings that boast the latest in digital infrastructure and design prowess, yet, to what extent do they consolidate open culture which is an emerging reality within all institutes of higher education is yet unresolved.
The instantaneity of digital communications, open culture in the internet and the Y2K generation’s affinity with gadgets and social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, has allowed for the emergence of a new learning setup for higher education, as Diana G. Obliner points out in her essay “Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education” discuss:
“(…) video conferencing, asynchronous threaded discussions, synchronous virtual interactions, networking, and small group collaborations using groupware, are able to support the kinds of learning activities (for example, brainstorming, concept-building, collaboration, and so on) that build skills twenty-first century students need”[12]
Architecture struggles to represent a new building context on which these emerging imperatives materialise into new principles or organisation. The classic situation where technologies advance at a far faster pace than the architectural discipline is taxing on the relevancy of the institutions that produce knowledge. Besides the multi modal interaction described, other issues such as co-creation have a greater impact in the curricula of the educational institution, therefore, in the spatial configuration of campuses. Obliner comments:
“Blogs have changed the very nature of journalism and politics by eroding the power of major media organizations, which have lost their exclusive right to comment on trends, file reports, or provide editorials. Would students learn more if asked to create and critique rather than to listen and absorb? If so, what does this mean for educational practice?” [13]
The shaking of educational practice itself by the very tools that allow for a rethinking of the practice should resonate in the same built space that is meant to harbour this same change in method. An example of a higher education institution that is embracing open learning and setting the standard in accessibility and sharing of content is MIT with their OpenCourseWare (OCW) program.[14] The first distinction from the OpenCourseWare program and other higher education institutions, such as the Open University, that operate with content being publicly available is that where the former proposes to give degrees based on online-learning, the OpenCourseware is inherently a library:
“OPCW is decidedly not a distance education program or an online, mediated learning system. Rather, it is a publication. Target audiences are a) educators, who may adopt or adapt the materials for their own teaching purposes; b) students enrolled in educational programs, who may use the materials for reference, practice, exercises, or mapping gout their programs of study; and c) self-learners, who may find the materials helpful for enhancing their personal knowledge.” [15]
OCW is a digital library. The principle of open learning is related to that of the library, storage and a purveyor of knowledge. The implications this had in convincing the academic staff to allow for their work to be widely available to people not necessarily enrolled in MIT, contravening the issue of profit and giving away your product, akin to Microsoft not giving away Windows licenses, is that, similar to Ubundu, MIT’s commitment was driven by the creation of a community, rather than another revenue source. At the core, the distinction was made that “OCW would not be competitive with MIT’s enrolment for traditional education. In doing so, he clearly delineated the distinction between educational materials and the processes of teaching and learning.”[16] The benefits this resource gives the campus community and in making teachers improve material for publication exceeds the conventional principles architects apply in the design of educational institutions. The revolution from within should be matched by an equal design restructuring of the campus organisation. MIT however, endorsing OCW on one side, is also an advocate of iconic campus buildings that is set to reinforce MIT’s commitment to excellence in education and state of the art construction techniques applied to educational projects, such as Frank Gehry’s Stata Centre.[17]
The two initiatives are slightly conflictive: where open learning beckons the possibility for a community that has reached a state of total democratization in resource availability, parametric complexity corroborating iconicity rather than a pedagogical principle. MIT Robotics Professor Rodney Brooks believes that the Centre “embodies the experimental nature of life at MIT.”[18] The success of the building in providing shelter and negotiate public space with office requirements is a given, yet, does not incorporate the underlying emerging condition of open learning that MIT is advocating to represent. Stata and OCW are two interpretations of the idea of the university, and the community representation of OCW is at odds with the architectural representation from Gehry.
The success and of OCW lies in it’s“[origins] from the grass roots, the faculty, rather than from the senior administration.” [19] Architecture and the association with the Robotics department involvement in Stata (“a number of other faculty worked closely with Frank Gehry during the design and construction phases of the Stata Centre.”(…)” Genetic algorithms were used to both tweak the mathematical curved forms of exterior surfaces and solve for a covering using standard sized rectangular pieces of metal”[20]) is indeed an example of collaboration serving the interest of the department, yet falls short from the higher principle of OCW in the housing of a faculty in a building, attempting to push forward the discipline it represents with their same technologies. The campus is therefore put in a situation of direct conflict in representing the openness in culture, in education and in architecture. It is one example where open culture has a direct impact in the values of an institution and where open culture has, via communication, affected the mechanics of the institution and the way its perceived. The physical representation of this effect has yet to be achieved.
The extent to which contemporary campuses acknowledge this conundrum is impeded by the dual compromise that the library would take for granted: store and access and the possibility for an open architecture:
“In the Y2K era, higher education interest and investment in enterprise administrative systems surged, and at about the same time IT security and data privacy emerged as the great hot-button issues of IT administration. Each of these initiatives can claim its successes, even if they may be hard to recognize in the busyness and confusion of day-to-day IT operations. But it may be time to declare that success more explicitly and consider how institutions can work towards their goals by giving as much attention to data’s long-term value as to its real-tome transactional value, and by investing in the ability to analyze data as well as the ability to lock it down.” [21]
Architecturally, the traditional sense of community, the same from which open culture emerges, is addressed in a passive manner the idea of intercommunication coming from the idea of interaction between student and staff, the informality of the discussion. The big difference being that the discussion has moved from the physical to the digital domain and has interconnected with other individuals around the world. Louis Kahn’s Ahmedabad institute in India is an example of Kahn’s ambition to prolong the moment of interaction with architectural gestures. Gropius’ Bauhaus at Dessau is another project where the plan and the laying out of faculty quarters correlate to an overall idea of communication and transparency. The Seattle Library, whilst not explicitly a campus library, pushes further the representation of the institution (e.g. library) and the potential its built space has to further condense society through communication technology and access and storage of information:
“Recalling the primary concept of the Seattle library is the transformation of the library into a multitasking social centre Koolhaas effectively merges the impact of new information technologies with the proliferation of cultural event spaces.”[22]
Yet the challenge remains, and while there still is a compromise from institutions and the sourcing of revenue, or, an Ubundu approach, resorting to revenue coming from demand of services, the profession of architecture in both of its exponents: service / consultation and product / built space, has achieved a degree of successful integration with open culture. This, however, is truncated from a potential richer source that open culture is aiming at: the redefinition of society in relations to community and knowledge accessibility and its repercussions in the city. Until that issue is not addressed, the same modest interpretations of open culture in architecture would result in isolated iconoclastic gestures or with a social networking based community, that, whilst deeply architectural in its services, does not reflect a greater restructuring of the profession from within, as seen in the educational realm. This new direction should be achieved, then, by dispelling the initial myth of open source of inefficient and unprofitable alternative: David Kahle points out:
“Rather than “you get what you pay for”, the sentiment “you get what you design for” may be a better characterization of open educational technology’s potential to positively affect teaching and learning.”[23]
CONCLUSION
Jonathan Hill in his essay “An Other Architect” articulates a vague, yet still relevant, definition of an architect:
“We make a vessel from a lump of clay; it is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful. We make doors and windows for a room; thus while the tangible has advantages, it is the intangible that makes it useful.” [24]
It is poignant to end the essay with two architects that contextualise the awkward position in which architecture is situating itself within the discourse of open culture. As I have tried to illustrate, the community based approach to open culture has already exponents that replicate the same approach in architecture that serves regions of the world with poor access to professionals in the field. That in itself is having a tremendous impact for the good, yet, just as the university is responsible for the welfare of the community it serves, social responsibility is not the only agenda that the institution has to advance:
“The question is whether such responses that enlarge the public culture should be understood as “social work” or whether they enhance the work of intellect. Too often, I think, such extensions of university “responsibility” have been praised as social service.”[25]
Open culture, as reflected in MIT’s OCW is a restructuring of the profession of teaching from within its covenants, from its founding tools of communication and dissemination of knowledge, via the latest technologies. For architects, the model Architecture for Humanity presents is another outlet for the same profession that is undertaken in conventional offices. It does not have the same deep restructuring potential as that of opening up a university and pushing the agenda more as a library, than as an institution that delivers degrees and takes its revenue from that source. Consultation with the community, as Sinclair would persuade with his NGO to be a viable alternative to open architecture is an alternative, yet, the built space remains unaffected by those decisions that have deep impact in the way architectural professionals operate.
Artists Neill Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska give a prospective alternative, deriving from the free association of artists and their patrons/clients/thematic subjects:
“In recent years we have developed a number of projects with museum collections, retail stores, galleries and art academies, all of which play a central role in structuring economies of value and exchange, between people and things. In these projects we have evolved a way of working which requires a detailed and prolonged period of research with the host institution. Rather than conceiving an artwork which is taken to a designated space of display – conventionally the gallery – we are interested in developing a range of practices relevant to the context of a particular project. The prospect of working with an archive devoted to the post-war history of design, manufacturing, and consumer goods, connected with, and provided the opportunity to extend our interest in material culture.”[26]
Perhaps, the alternative altogether that would combine consultation and community based architecture with an open built environment would be a re-understanding of the profession in regards to the services it provides, rather than in the direct built outcome. By doing so, the building outcome would become the representation of the community as there hasn’t been a centralisation of intent. The professionalisation of designing for buildings is loosened, so it matches the open agenda of service provision by demands of a community that is benefited by the free service of the expert consultants. This would suggest a weakening of the discipline, yet, pursuing a consistency with the principles of design that people like Cameron Sinclair advocate; a true openness would be achieved. The same power that is given by the responsibility of providing a design solution is dismantled in the opening of the profession and of the buildings that no longer represent the individual, but a collective, and the community. Just as OCW was successful in its grass roots approach, this possibility for alternative practice would potentially succeed in delivering a potential open architecture, not in theory, but in physicality.
It is my ambition on my diploma project to suggest one potential interpretation of this concept and of my immediate professional career to develop: open culture is a product of our digital age and I believe architecture should rise up to the potential it offers in its practice and in the organisation of buildings, just as other disciplines, in this essay being discussed education primarily, are already successfully trying to do so.
Bibliography
BENDER, Thomas, “The University and the City: from Medieval origins to the present”, Oxford University Press, New York, USA, 1998
BIERI, Susanne, WALTHER, Fuchs, “Building for Books: Traditions and Visions”, Birkhauser, Basel, 2001.
BRANZI, Andrea, “Weak and Diffuse Modernity: The World of Projects at the beginning of the 21st Century”, SKIRA, Milan, 2006.
BROWN, John Seely, “Sustaining the Ecology of Knowledge”, johnseelybrown.com/Sustaining_the_Ecology_of_Knowledge.pdf,
CUMMINGS, Neil and LEWANDOWSKA, Marysia, “Documents : a photoworks in-site project”, 1st December 2000, Design Council Archive, University of Brighton, http://www.chanceprojects.com/node/104
DiBONA, Chris, OCKMAN, Sam, STONE, Mark, “Open Sources : Voices from the Open Source Revolution”, O, Reilly, California, 1999.
HILL, Jonathan, “Occupying Architecture: Between the Architect and the User”, Routledge, New York, 1998.
IIYOSHI, Toru, KUMAR, M.S. Vijay, “Opening Up Education: The Collective Advancement of Education through Open Technology, Open Content, and Open Knowledge”, MIT Press, London, 2008.
READINGS, Bill, “The University in Ruins”, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, USA, 1999.
SINCLAIR, Cameron “http://www.architectureforhumanity.org”
The Tech, MIT Newspaper, November 9th 2007, http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N53/lawsuit.html
YANOSKY, Ronald, “Key Findings: Institutional Data Management in Higher Education”, EDUCAUSE, Centre for Applied Research, http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EKF/EKF0908.pdf, 2009
VANCE, Ashlee, “A software populist who doesn’t do Windows”, New York Times, January 10th, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&th&emc=th
[1]See Figure 1 in Appendix.
[2] BROWN, John Seely, “Sustaining the Ecology of Knowledge”, johnseelybrown.com/Sustaining_the_Ecology_of_Knowledge.pdf, p.1
[3] Ibid., p. 8.
[4] KAHLE, David, “Designing Open Technology” in “Opening Up Education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge”, MIT Press, London, 2008, p. 27.
[5] TORVALDS, Linus, “The Linux Edge”, in “Open Sources : Voices from the Open Source Revolution”, O, Reilly, California, 1999, p. 101.
[6] Ibid., p. 104
[7] Loc. Cit.
[8] See Figure 2.
[9] VANCE, Ashlee, “A software populist who doesn’t do Windows”, New York Times, January 10th, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3&th&emc=th
[10] http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/
[11] “Architecture for Humanity is a catalyst for innovation. We learn by doing. We know the value of sharing success stories and lessons learned—our own as well as those of others. To foster knowledge sharing and promote best practices, we developed the Open Architecture Network. This groundbreaking on-line network empowers architects, designers, builders and their clients to share architectural plans and drawings—including CAD files. All plans are shared through an open-source model and can be freely downloaded by all.”, http://www.architectureforhumanity.org/
[12] OBLINER, Diana G., “Common Knowledge: Openness in Higher Education” in “Opening Up Education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge”, p. 391.
[13] Ibid., p. 390.
[14] See Figure 3 in Appendix.
[15] LERMAN, Steven R., MIYAGAWA Shigeru, MARGULIES, Anne H., “OpenCourseWare: Building a culture of Sharing”, in “Opening Up Education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge”, p. 215.
[16] Ibid., p.217.
[17] See Figure 4 in Appendix.
[18] The Tech, MIT Newspaper, November 9th 2007, http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N53/lawsuit.html
[19] LERMAN, Steven R., MIYAGAWA Shigeru, MARGULIES, Anne H., Op. Cit., p. 219
[20] The Tech, Op. Cit.
[21] Ibid., p. 12.
[22] BIERI, Susanne, WALTHER, Fuchs, “Building for Books: Traditions and Visions”, Birkhauser, Basel, 2001, p.413
[23] Loc. Cit.
[24] HILL, Jonathan, “An Other Architect” in “Occupying Architecture”, p. 139
[25] BENDER, Thomas, “The University and the City: from Medieval origins to the present”, Oxford University Press, New York, USA, 1998, p. 295.
[26] CUMMINGS, Neil and LEWANDOWSKA, Marysia, “Documents : a photoworks in-site project”, 1st December 2000, Design Council Archive, University of Brighton, http://www.chanceprojects.com/node/104
