Author: theodora vardouli

The last few posts are parts of a thought experiment which aims to problematize “Open Architecture” by looking at the different faces of the phrase itself. One my central hypotheses in this blog has been that “Open Source” operates as a “boundary space”. This idea borrows from Star and Griesemer’s discussion of “boundary objects” as objects which have “different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable, a means of translation” [1]. Along these lines, “Open Source” is analyzed as a space which various disciplines use to rethink their models of production, distribution and use of knowledge and artifacts. This process draws simultaneously from their disciplinary concerns and history as well as from metaphors and free associations with the worlds of Software and Hardware, where the ideas of Open Source have been predominantly developed.
In order to understand how the various discussions on Open Architecture(s) use metaphors from “Open Source” I propose a strategy which begins by isolating different word combinations contained in the phrase “Open [Source (Code)] Architecture” and then seeks to expose potential questions that they raise and tensions that they contain. These complementary framings aim to problematize the Open Source metaphor in architecture from as many perspectives as possible.

The word-systems that I have so far analyzed are [Open, Open Source] and [Open, Source, Architecture]. I first examined the history of Open Source so as to expose the ideological tensions between “Open” and “Free”. This aimed to challenge the assumption that “Open” has an inherently democratizing intention, although its results may provide this potential. I then discussed how the idea of access to the “Source”, which is central in the OSS definition translates in Architecture, where the ambiguity between information and end result is vast.
This post continues this word game by proposing the system [Open, Code, Architecture]. The question of what “Code” is in Architecture and therefore what “Open Code” would be, is far beyond the scope and the length of this post. My purpose is to propose a series of -essentially elliptic- framings of architectural Code, which can be useful in informing the discussion on Open Architecture.
A fascinating aspect of this discussion is that Code, as a set of instructions which lead to an end product, can be viewed from a double perspective in architecture: building code (building regulations) and computational code (building representation and generative tools). Each one of these areas contains, in turn, multiple meanings and interpretations. Starting from the idea of building code, as a regulatory system developed around the processes and objects of building, it is interesting to trace these different meanings.

On Code
A commonly shared belief is that the first building code was the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1780 BC). This code regulates the social relations around the act of building and assigns responsibilities in case of accidents or failures. Apart from the surprising austerity of the punishments it prescribes, what is interesting to observe is that it is very much structured around the idea of building safety. However, instead of codifying the design requirements to achieve it, it provides some strong “incentives” to ensure it. A telling example is: “If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death”.
Current building codes, have of course little to do with that. Carrying the same principle of safety and extending it to a discourse on public health and welfare, they mandate a set of rules and requirements with which buildings have to comply in order to be built. As far as the legislative part is concerned, codes are either laws of the state, proposed by committees of experts and tailored to local requirements with governmental decrees; or they can be specified by the local authorities based on “model codes”. Indicative examples of that are the Eurocode, which applies to all the countries of the EU replacing their former national codes or the International Building Code, which has been adopted by US states such as New York.

All professional architects are required to build “to code”.
In fact this is the most common source of disillusionment for most beginning professionals, who nurtured in the freedom of academia, find themselves operating within a highly structured and rigid framework. Code creates an entire ecosystem of code-knowers, code-interpreters and code-policers, which to a great extend defines the landscape of architectural practice.

When it comes to the actual content of the code, the discussion has again multiple dimensions. A first set of rules is related to the building itself and its resilience to accidents and natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, floods etc. In many cases, the history of code revisions narrates a parallel history of natural catastrophes. An indicative example is the seismic code in Greece, oscillating between the politics of profit of the building industry (inexpensive concrete, fast construction) and the frequent seismic activity, resulting in multi-victim failures of large parts of the built fabric. The history of form of the greek polykatoikia (popular multi-storey building) can be seen to certain extend as a history of corrective moves following large disasters.
Apart from ensuring the safety of the residents, building codes are meant to also ensure their “wellbeing”. One aspect of this is expressed through the “medicalization” of building and the emergence of requirements evolving around the idea of “health” (from the size and number window openings to forbidden hazardous materials), parallel to the modernization of cities. Another interesting aspect that can be discussed through looking at building codes is the idea of standardization of human measurements. How high can the rise of a stair be? How wide should its steps be? What is the minimum height of a space? How wide does a corridor have to be? John Hardwood’s “The Interface: Ergonomics and the aesthetics of survival”[2] offers very interesting observations on the technologies of wellbeing and their relation to the concepts of the “normal”, the “machine” and the “environment”.

However, code requirements do not just stem from the building itself, but articulate a relationship of this building with the larger ensembles in which it participates (the neighborhood, the city). Within this context, code defines the relationship between the local and the global. The idea of safety, now becomes public safety, the idea of health, public health etc. The first building codes which also coincided with the forces of modernization in Europe (17th-18th century) were prophylactic measures taken after -again- catastrophic events (plagues, fires etc). The distances between the buildings, the materials of their facades or their geometric characteristics so as to allow for proper light and air in the public space were the types of requirements which progressively became codified. Code as a new form of top down “policing”, defining the way through which bodies are arranged in space as well as the characteristics of that space, cannot be viewed cut off from its political connotations.
However, apart from stemming from-, and exercising, biopolitical power, building codes are also often deployed to preserve a specific “character of place”, which is judged as important for the preservation of community union or national identity. Most practicing architects have stories to share about their experiences of building within “traditional” communities, where the code requirements extend beyond the general geometric characteristics of buildings and mandate formal elements of the design (size and shape of windows, geometry of roofs, colors, materials) These formal characteristics become the trademark of the community. Very telling examples of this in are gated communities and artificial cities around the world which come with a very specific set of building regulations to construct a very specific “spirit of place”. The regulations of Disney’s Celebration are a fascinating example in this direction.
Last but not least, codes specify land use. These specifications are based on prospective models of urban activity and have been an issue of vast controversy throughout the 20th century. From Modernist zoning, exemplified by the Athens Charter (1943), to the postmodern apotheosis of urban complexity, the functional mapping of cities had been a central debate in architectural and urban discourse.

A summary of these diverse observations, is that building code is a top down framework of instructions which gets locally interpreted so as to produce buildings and building complexes with specific qualitative characteristics (“safety”, “well-being”, “beauty”, “character”).
The question is then, what are the implications of the Code being Open?

Opening the Code
I propose that this idea of openness can be interpreted through three different prisms.
The first is more decentralized, participatory building regulations, which allow for inhabitants and communities to have a say in what the underlying principles of their environment are. An example of this is the DPZ Smartcode, a “template intended for local calibration to your town or neighborhood”
The second prism through which the idea of “Open Code” can be viewed is a set of rules which instead of subordinating the local to the global, assert the whole as emerging from local rules and relations. This bottom-up model has long been capturing the architectural imaginary. Drawing its references from vernacular architecture where the only restriction in building is the approval of one’s neighbors, this model was framed by many architects as the pathway to better, more sustainable and more “democratic” designs. Of particular interest are the cases in which these negotiations have been formalized into written rules. Throughout my studies in Athens, I was fascinated by my Professor’s, Dimitris Papalexopoulos, descriptions on the vernacular law of Syros which explicitly described the local, neighboring rules of urban growth.

A third attitude towards “Open Code” is the interplay of local conditions with global constraints. This has been the conceptual basis of the early architectural techno-utopias from which I often draw my references. Friedman’s FLATWRITER, for example, proposed a “softer” kind of code (iso-effort lines) and a resilient infrastructure within which every local desire would be negotiated and accommodated.
This opens the discussion to another kind of Code, computational this time, which was initially vested with the vision to couple “the very large and the very small”. In his 1970 book “The Architecture Machine”[3], Nicholas Negroponte framed this vision as a new Humanism enabled by machines. According to his analysis, the main problem with architects was the fact that they were accustomed to the middle scale of the buildings and therefore proved incompetent to handle the complexities of the general (the urban) or the specificities of the very small, perpetuating a gap between the scale of the mass and the scale of the individual. In the new machine “humanism” that he envisions, intelligent machines combine the adaptability of humans and the computational specificity in order to recognize general shifts in context, as well as particular changes, in need and desire. Negroponte envisions an architect-machine partnership, where the machine exhibits alternatives, suggestions, incompatibilities and oversees the urban rights of individuals. In his later book “Soft Architecture Machines” [4] (1975), Negroponte develops this vision into an anti-architect discourse. As Alexander will later do in his “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”[5], Negroponte characterized the existence of local conditions within unifying global forces as the alphabet of the language of the vernacular. Following this concept of a global “objective” system that allows for local intuitive solutions, he proposed a framework of a resilient building and information technology and introduced a new type of personalized architecture machine, a “design Amplifier” which constitutes the interface between the infrastructure and the user’s ever changing needs.

On (another kind of) Code
In the last part of my post, I will further examine the relationship between the computational code and building code through current examples. I will draw my examples from an edition of one of the most widely circulated architectural periodicals today, the Architectural Design (AD) magazine. The 2009 volume, entitled “Digital Cities”, addressed precisely this question of the interplay of computational code with the production or simulation of complex building assemblages; cities. The different tendencies towards code which emerge in this volume are very useful in problematizing the role of the computational code in the democratization of the building code.
The first article that I will comment on is Patrick Schumacher’s controversial “Parametricism: a New Global Style for Architecture and Urban Design”. Patrick Schumacher is a powerful actor in the current architectural scene with a central role in the Architectural Association in London and as a close collaborator of the renown “digital” architect Zaha Hadid. Taking as a common axis the concept of parametricism, Schumacher sketches the vision for urban design “to integrate the building morphology – all the way to the detailed tectonic articulation and the interior organisation”. He calls this idea “deep relationality”, denoting the integration of all urban subsystems in a unified global, designed system. This system may allow for infinite differentiation, but always relates the local to the global and vice versa under the vision of a rationalized complexity. The top down control of the urban environment, through the computational descriptions of a global system does not need the straight line to be characterized as deeply Modernist. The hegemony of the computational code brings Schumacher’s visions in very close convergence with the modernist ideals of rationality and order besides the mere appearance of visual complexity and differentiation offered by digital tools.

On the opposite side, Steven Johnson, quoted by Neil Leach in his article “Swarm Urbanism”[6] describes the city as an emergent motif in time. According to Johnson, the city has all the characteristics of a dynamic, adaptive system which evolves based on neighboring relations, feedbacks and indirect control. For him the city should demonstrate a bottom up collective intelligence, not unlike a population of cooperating monads (swarm).
For Neil Leach the concept of emergence, which becomes increasingly popular in architectural discourses, can be traced both as a characteristic of urban systems and as a computational model. Based on this observation Leich raises the question to which extend the latter (computational tools) can be deployed to model and design the former (urban form). Leach refers to the architectural group Kokkugia, which does not attempt to simulate the movement of agents in the city so as to produce an optimal solution, but aims to develop an adaptive and flexible system based on a collective and self-organizing intelligence. The transition from the master-plan to the master-algorithm, views urban planning as a set of micro- or local decisions which create a complex urban system.

The computational metaphor is very powerful here. The central assumption is that computational systems with bottom-up structures (Cellular Automata, L-Systems) can lead to bottom-up, emergent urban complexes, which are not designed per se, but result from the interactions of the material mass of the city and the ever changing needs of its inhabitants. An example of this approach is the Kokkugia project entitled “Behavioral Urbanism”, which uses cellular automata to envision a growing and shrinking city, not very different from the 1960s megastructural visions discussed in the “Tracing lines of thought” section of the blog. The code here refers only local rules, offering agency to the user, whose decisions and actions control their activation. The lack of centralized, global control may “Open” the system to local perturbations, but does not grant the user direct access to the “code” which guides them.

The project which in my opinion offers interesting insight on the idea of what would constitute a truly “Open” urban and architectural system, is the science fictional fantasy of the provocative French group R&Sie(n).
Their “I’ve heard about…” project is presented as a vision for an unpredictable organic urbanism, which resists to the conventional desire to control urban systems. The regulations for this urban system is not a building code, but a series of “neighborhood protocols”. These protocols do make explicit stylistic references to traditional building codes; short phrases, numbering; axioms, paragraphs, articles and chapters build up the “I’ve heard about…” constitution.

In R&Sie(n)’s project, the city is an inhabitable organism, a biostructure in constant evolution , materialized in real time with a fleet of robots controlled by open source algorithms and interpreting an amalgamate of “internal” and “external” data. Human desires are communicated either verbally, through an electronic participation system, or through the chemical excretions of the body, traced through inhaled 24 hour micro-transmitters. This constantly destabilizes the system leading to unpredictable results. When it comes to the structure and the code of the system these are in constant negotiation and reprogramming. The only thing that remains stable, is a set of general rules, axioms which oxymoronically ensure that the system remains unstable and open to change.
In R&Sie(n) project, the “I’ve heard about…” bio-citizens participate in collectively shaping the space that they inhabit. Not unlike Nicholas Negroponte’s interconnected Design Amplifiers, the fleet of building robots becomes the space where the desires of the individuals and a set of “objective” building constraints (an idiosyncratic computationally-coded-building-code) come together. What is very different in R&Sie(n) discussion is that unlike the tradition of the early computational theories which accommodated the unpredictable by allowing for local action within a resilient infrastructure (computational or physical), the Protocol, or the Code of the “I’ve heard about…” project, is not a naturalized black box, determined by the “designer”, but a modifiable framework, accessed and controlled by the collective.

How one passes from this science fictional exploration to its actualization in physical space remains a very hard, almost un-answerable question. However, R&Sie(n) fantasy seems to propose a mental model which learns from the criticisms of the techno-utopias of the 1960s and 1970s and builds on the cyber-cultural potential for real time communication and collaboration. Using these as raw materials it envisions a truly Open Source space; indeterminate, unpredictable, participatory and co-designed. Has that not always been the role of utopia; to create experimental laboratories in which alternate not-so-unreal worlds can emerge?

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Notes:
[1] Star S.,Griesemer, J. Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science 19 (3), 1989
[2] Harwood J., The Interface: Ergonomics and the Aesthetics of Survival. in Aggregate, Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming)
[3] Negroponte, N. The Architecture Machine. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1970
[4] Negroponte, N. Soft Architecture Machines. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1975
[5] Alexander, Ch. 1977. A pattern language : towns, buildings, construction / Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, with Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, Shlomo Angel. New York : Oxford University Press
[6] Leach N., ‘Swarm Urbanism’, in Neil Leach (ed.), Digital Cities, London: Wiley, 2009, pp. 56-63

Last Thursday I had the exciting opportunity to meet with Professor Nicholas Negroponte and talk with him about the Architecture Machine Group.

Nicholas Negroponte’s early work has long been central in my research. His 1975 book, Soft Architecture Machines, was the first explicit reference to the idea, means and methods of computer aided participatory design. I have always been fascinated by the way this text fused the technological imaginaries of the time (Artificial Intelligence), with radical programmatic architectural diagrams (Yona Friedman), principles from vernacular architecture and ongoing research at MIT (conversation theory, technologies for learning, sketch recognition and representation) to problematize the role of computation in design and to construct a new coherent diagram of the design process, actively destabilizing the roles of its actors.

Taking as a point of departure indigenous architecture Negroponte identifies the existence of local conditions within unifying global forces as the alphabet of the vernacular language. Following this concept of a global “objective” system that allows for local intuitive solutions, negroponte proposes a framework of a resilient building and information technology and introduces a new type of personalized architecture machine, a “design Amplifier” that constitutes the interface between the infrastructure and the user’s ever changing needs.
The visionary character of his proposal brings to mind Marvin Minsky’s comment: “and Nicholas was incredibly productive at… at the beginning of computer science, of… thinking of things that no one else imagined computers doing.”
I interviewed Professor Negroponte about the importance of participatory design in his research, his relation with Yona Friedman, his thoughts on prospective thinking and architecture and his attitude about the revisiting of these ideas under the light of current technological advances and the spread of open source culture.

Nicholas Negroponte’s first reaction to my question on his early studies in computer aided participatory design was that these ideas never really went anywhere and were soon abandoned. Interestingly, Professor Negroponte denoted that the closest the concepts discussed in Soft Architecture Machines came to realization was the SEEK project shown at the New York City Jewish museum in 1970. The SEEK project, also known as Blockworld, was a provocative part of the exhibition “SOFTWARE. Information technology: its new meaning for art”, curated by Jack Burnam.
The exhibit consisted of a small group of Mongolian desert gerbils, which were placed in an environment of plexiglass blocks constantly rearranged by a robotic arm. The basic concept was that the mechanism would observe the interaction of the gerbils with their habitat (the blocks), and would gradually “learn” their “living preferences” by observing their behavior. This machine was conceived as both a “cybernetic world model” and a “behaviourist laboratory for observation and experimentation”.

[source 1=”http://www.projektklasse.de/html/personen/lehrende.html” language=”:”][/source]

I found the placement of SEEK and Soft Architecture Machines in such close proximity very intriguing. In a first reaction, it is rather counterintuitive to link the unmediated expression of user desires via a soft, “informed” machine, with the derivation of behavior rules for rodents rearranging their environment. However, a closer reading of this comment leads to the realization that these two projects intersect when it comes to the role of the machine; the fascination with the prospect of implementing a system which can observe, learn and anticipate behavior individual’s surrogate, their problem worrying partner, able to predict their behavior and reconcile the local with the global.
What is unique in the case of Soft Architecture machines is that they are the result of a cross-fertilization of the visions of the golden age of Artificial Intelligence at MIT and the vibrant ideas of Cybernetics, with european influences, namely the work of the “eccentric” Yona Friedman and Gordon Pask.

Professor Negroponte spoke about his close acquaintance with Yona Friedman and his wife, who he met during one of their stays in the United States. At that time Yona Friedman had already written the “Towards a scientific Architecture” and had set out the idea of the FLATWRITER, as a self planning tool which combined user participation with behavioral self reflection. To use Negroponte’s word, the diagrams that Yona Friedman was trying at the time “were sufficiently computational” as to provide a basis for implementation. It seems that at the time Friedman’s systematic thinking and his discussion on the democratization of architecture through technology met one of the fundamental principles which have consistently characterized Nicholas Negroponte’s work since its early days to the current era.

It was refreshing to hear Professor Negroponte’s enduring technological optimism. Although his later work at the Media Lab and his devotion to the One Laptop Per Child campaign, made the Architecture Machine a fascinated episode of the cybernetic era, clearly however demarcated in the past, Nicholas Negroponte confessed that it was at that time that he wrote the best line he had ever written. This line was the subtitle of the 1970 Architecture Machine book, a vision and a manifesto at the same time. “The Architecture Machine: Toward a more Human Environment”.
Negroponte’s technological humanism, his deep belief that machines make us more human and his life long devotion in the development of visual and technological literacy made him very receptive to ideas which were stemming from political and social movements around Europe and advocated for collective ownership of information and information processing and the participation of users in decision making processes.

Nicholas Negroponte’s early work, as a visionary fusion of affine elements drawn from different areas and disciplines, under the overarching principle of technological optimism produced a very powerful construct, a new diagram of the role of the user, the architect and the technological platform in the handling of the tension between the individual and the collective, the local and the global, the way in which design is conceived and realized. In that sense, although the idea of computer aided participatory design was left in the shelves, it produced multiple offsprings; from intelligent environments to contemporary paradigms of user driven design, to current conceptions of technology mediated participatory design. Establishing these links and tracing affinities and disparities in their fundamental principles, their assumptions and the tools that they employ is a very suggestive uncharted territory.

Leaving aside the controversy around its originality, the alleged Linus Torvalds quote “The future is open source everything” captures a tendency which is gradually gaining ground in the collective imaginary. The constantly growing wave of translations and interpretations of the tools, practices and concepts of open source in almost all the domains of human activity, makes this quote shift from a provocative speculation to a plausible observation – not to say a realizable “project”.

In most of these cases, ranging from hardware and robotics to governance and religion (!) “Open” drifts away from its initial meaning and becomes a space for rethinking the fundamental assumptions of the way knowledge, space and artifacts (material and immaterial) are produced and used.
I particularly enjoy the understanding of words as combinators, spaces where ideas are brought together -often through misuse- and allow for the mixing of concepts which would not be directly comparable if one was to strict about them. In that sense the term “Open source” is a laboratory for the production of new diagrams and the re-conception of how we create and use within the context of the digital paradigm. It is characteristic that in many cases, practices based on free sharing and modification of the information leading to an “end product” existed long prior to their naming as “open”; from cooking, to popular medicine, and vernacular architecture.

However, this situation of semantic flux, poses the danger of labeling as “open” practices which widely differ in their philosophy and operational modes. This can result either to a misleading sanctioning of “open source” practices as inherently “free” or “democratic” and vice versa, to the reduction of practices which intend to be “free” and “democratic” to merely being “open”.
It is therefore important to disambiguate the term by placing it in its historical perspective, so as to identify its inherent tensions, questions and challenges, which can serve as essential frameworks of critique in the various acts of the termʼs adoptions and translations beyond its initial use in software.

An indicative example of the loose, merely discursive use of “Open Source” is the recent op ed article on Open Source Architecture, initiated by Carlo Ratti et al. Quoting from the current Wikipedia version: “Open Source Architecture (OSArc) is an emerging paradigm describing new procedures for the design, construction and operation of buildings, infrastructure and spaces. Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, avant-garde architectural theory, science fiction, language theory, and others, it describes an inclusive approach to spatial design, a collaborative use of design software and the transparent operation throughout the course of a building and city’s life cycle”
What is interesting about this quote, which is then supported by a series of more specific observations ranging from the role of the non expert and the professional to funding models, is that it shows precisely the intersection of a preexisting architectural imaginary which I discussed in my previous posts, with the growing open source culture, to produce a new ambiguous construct which conveys more the general atmosphere of a thing rather than the goals and practices of the thing itself.
This, of course, cannot be seen as different from a long tradition in architectural thought, which borrowed from new technological paradigms (in this case the network paradigm and the open sharing of information) to produce the spatial imaginaries of its time.

However if we are to truly rethink participatory practices in architecture, under the light of the digital paradigm and open source culture and not revert to the repetition of the same schemes with a false sense of innovation, it becomes important to move both vertically and horizontally in time. To investigate, in other words, both at the relations of current conceptions on “Open Architecture” with the precedents of technology mediated participatory design, as well as its relations with “Open Source”. The purpose of this post is to do the latter by looking at the term “open source” in the context of software and exposing its internal conflicts and potential discontents.

The Open Source Initiative is the prodigy child of the Free Software Movement. It was found as a California public benefit corporation in 1998 by some of the members of the FSM who to use Richard Stallmanʼs words “splintered off and began campaigning in the name of “open source”[1]. A commonly shared explanation for this is that, contrary to “Open Source”, the term “Free” was menacing for corporations and investors who found this practice too precarious or politically loaded for their taste. Given this sequence of events and the fact that “Open Source” was initially defined in response to another term condensing a set of concepts and practices, it is impossible to grasp the essence of “Open Source” without first discussing “Free”.

The Free Software Movement was initiated in 1985 by Richard Stallman, who was at the time a hacker and programmer at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 1984 Stallman launched GNU, a free operating system, as a response to the growing proprietarization of software and its bundling with specific hardware. This, along with the establishment of software copyright laws in 1980, subverted a common practice in the first years of software use and development which were based on the idea of software sharing and modification according to the personal needs of the users.

The Free Software movement advocated for “free software as a matter of freedom”. Quoting from the GNU project “philosophy” webpage: “people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These possibilities make software as useful as it is; we believe software users should be able to make use of them”[2]
The reference to immaterial production as a par excellence field where “free” can function, not having to deal with the complexities of the material world is a statement which set the boundaries of “free” practices until recently, when groups and communities undertook the challenge of “open sourcing” the physical world. The “Open source hardware definition”, “open design” and to a next level the nascent idea of “Open Architecture” are now moving along these lines, developing layered definitions to address the material and immaterial aspects of the issue.
The most powerful implication, however, of Stallmanʼs statement is that “socially useful” applications can only emerge if users are in control of the technologies that they are using. Stallman advocates for the unmediated expression of the needs and desires of the users, by allowing them to be simultaneously producers and users of the technologies that they employ. The famous moto “Free as in Speech, not in Beer”, exemplifies the fundamental principle of the Free Software Movement, which evolves around four essential freedoms, teasingly numbered from 0-3.
■ The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
■ The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you
wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
■ The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
■ The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this
you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. [3]

If one was to take a step back and abstract these principles in a more generic design process of a given immaterial “thing”, then what Stallman seems to be suggesting is freedom of use, freedom of modification/redesign, sharing and common-ing. The objective of a technology for the users by the users, as a way to true freedom and social change (sharing and collaboration), along with the rupture of the FSM principles from traditional centralized economic models structured around intellectual property, expert priesthoods and proprieratization, made the idea of “free” spread in the realms of immaterial production.
Free cultural works, whose open editing phase was initiated in May 1, 2006 by Erik Moller, with the support of Richard Stallman, Lawrence Lessig, Angela Beesley, and Benjamin Mako Hill, exemplify such an act of creative translation in the world of cultural production, under the vision of culture as a participatory, collectively driven process, constantly enriched by the contributions of its receptors.

Along the same lines of the abstractions of the principles of the Free Software Movement in any design process, the idea of user control and the priming of the collective and the social both as the “subject” who produces and uses the “goods” in question, has strong conceptual affinities with Yona Friedmanʼs reference to an architecture which moves beyond the architectʼs (authorʼs) hypotheses, allowing the users to create their own hypotheses. This brings back to the surface, from a different area this time, the discourse on the roles of the expert and the non expert in the process of decision making. In a world that becomes increasingly digitized, Richard Stallman sees software freedom as a precondition of social freedom and a ground for solidarity, collaboration and sharing. He states: “In this freedom, it is the user’s purpose that matters, not the developer’s purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.” [4] The principle of transferring control to the user, however, does not only rely on the act of giving them access to the source code, but implies that the code itself is actually accessible (ie. legible and not obfuscated). The issue of accessibility as a property which can be designed into the actual “free” product rather than being taken for granted, opens the door to a two-way discussion, referring both to the design decisions which ensure this accessibility of a “product” by others, as well as the “literacy” of the users. Within that context education and technologies for learning could very well fit into this discussion, opening tangents such as the work of Seymour Papert at MIT and the architectural language studies (symbols, sketch recognition etc) which had been conducted both by the Architecture Machine Group and in various places in Europe (Friedman, Habraken). When it comes to the case of architecture, or more generally to art, which is an inherently ambiguous area, the definition of what a non-obfuscated code would be is a hard intellectual exercise, as one has to balance between overly legible -to the extend of being populistic- conceptions of art and architecture and their eclectic counterpart, which asserts certain groups of literati, by making through “difficult”, unfamiliar languages. That said, it seems that knowledge and education is a central issue in the discussion of (software) freedom. Although the different licenses and distribution models, beyond the core concept of copylefting, are essential to the Free Software Definition, their thorough description would be beyond the scope and objective of my post. What is interesting, however, is that this is the space where one can locate subtle distinctions between “Free” and “Open”.

Open Source started as a means to transcend the alleged confusion around what the word “free” denotes. Although it is difficult to identify blatant differences between the two definitions, and the former seem to consider themselves as intellectual offsprings of the latter, Richard Stallman argues that the Open Source movement has very little to do with the philosophy and objectives of “Free”.

His article titled: “Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software” can serve as a very suggestive frame of critique exposing a series of questions around the idea of “Open”. In the following paragraphs I will attempt to isolate the main points of his discussion which go beyond software per se and relate to the ideological and conceptual underpinnings of the term “Open Source”.
The first point that Stallman is making is the priming of practicality vs freedom. In their attempt to appeal to the business world, the Open Source supporters adopted a vocabulary of efficiency and convenience related to having fast, cheap and reliable software. In that sense, the “Open Source” movement adopted a vocabulary which made it a convincing business model denuding it from its political and social objectives and connotations. “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.” [5] This distinction is very valuable within the broader discussion on technology democratization, as it places technological efficiency and user freedom in opposing camps, if not in terms of practice, then definitely in terms of value systems, the one leading to capitalist completion and “better” products and the other to true social change through processes of sharing, collaboration and communication. As Stallman characteristically denotes: “A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, “I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?” This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.” [6]

If linguistic ambiguity is framed as a danger when it comes to “free”, then the one way meaning of “open source” is even more problematic because of its overly literate meaning which cultivates the wrong common assumption that access to the source code suffices for a project to be characterized as open. This point brings us back to where we started, to the need for a disambiguation of the term so as not to act as a trojan horse for practices which not only are not open, but conflict with the fundamental principles of freedom and openness. Stallman rejects the opportunistic use of the word and its translation in other disciplines and areas of human practice, and claims that the principles of free software are specific to software.
“The term “open source” has been further stretched by its application to other activities, such as government, education, and science, where there is no such thing as source code, and where criteria for software licensing are simply not pertinent. The only thing these activities have in common is that they somehow invite people to participate. They stretch the term so far that it only means “participatory”. [7]

Besides Stallmanʼs call for caution, the imaginary of “Open Source” is forming a new culture of production and use, with constantly growing echoes in spatial theory and practices. Instead of disrupting this imaginary we should perhaps embrace it exposing at the same time the history and internal tensions of the words themselves. Along these lines, mapping flavors of openness in the spectrum from free to open source, from principle to practicality and from a vehicle for social change to a design methodology, can be an invaluable tool for reframing past practices and seeking new diagrams and interpretations.

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Notes
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
[2], [3], [4] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[5], [6], [7] op.cit [1]

In my last post I examined a shift in architectural discourse which emerged from the cycles of International Modernism and subverted its most fundamental assumptions from the inside. This discourse, initiated at the CIAM 10 in Dubrovnik questioned the practices of the architect-expert as paternalistic and by definition reductionist, unable to account for the complexities of modern life, and advocated for systems which allow for the expression of the “relational needs of man in society” [1]. The vision was to orchestrate architectures which transcend the “pure and inhuman technique of modernist functionalism”[2] and are receptive to unpredictable, ever changing personal needs; or to use Yona Friedman’s words “personal hypotheses”. Within this context the megastructural topologies of spatial urbanism are born as the “return to the science fictional attributes of the Modern Movement, ideal and magical, detached from the real where they think they adhere”[3]
Of course, one cannot dissociate this climate of architectural prospectiveness from the broader spatial culture in France. In his text “The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970”[4] Larry Busbea argues that the unbuilt projects of spatial urbanism were in fact depictions, representations of this spatial culture. He proposes to read them as a mixture of the flux space of the postwar “trentes glorieuses” in France, the thriving of structuralist thought and the emergence of a discourse amongst intellectuals allowing for the conception of a technological humanism (Van Lier, Simondon, Moles).
The situation of spatial urbanism in its historical context, or in other words its reading as a cultural product made at a specific place and time is inarguably valuable and perhaps more valid from a methodological standpoint. However, what I am interested in doing in this post is to look at spatial urbanism as a diagram of technology mediated design participation; to detach it from its context and examine its structures and operational modes.
I have already framed the hypothesis that there are interesting diagrammatic affinities between the way the roles of the architect, the user and the technological platform are conceptualized in spatial urbanism and in early computer aided participatory design (1970-1975). These affinities are often overshadowed by a clear difference of the general climate in which all these proposals were formed. On the one hand, the engagement of the users in the design process through the help of computers is seen as an episode of american technocratic pragmatism and the spatial culture in France stemming from a network of philosophical and political referents. Busbea’s observation that “The French engagement with these networks and systems was fundamentally different than that of the Americans, whose energies were clearly focused on economic superiority and political supremacy”[5] is indicative of such differences which exclude the possibility of parallel readings of the french and the anglo-saxon scene.

In this post I will talk about Yona Friedman’s Spatial City [6] along with the space allocation and design program that accompanied it (the Flatwriter), Nicholas Negroponte’s Soft Architecture Machines [6] and John Frazer’s Evolutionary Architecture [7], to propose three intersecting diagrams of technology mediated participatory design, with emphasis on the way the technological tool is figured / conceptualized in the process.
I claim that these proposals can be read under the prism of three main schemes: technology-as-environment, technology-as-subject and technology-as-toolkit respectively. This schematization is a first attempt towards a taxonomy which can be used as a conceptual frame to discuss current practices of technologies for the democratization of design, or -as the title denotes- design for empowerment for design.

1. Urban climates: designing the new Umwelt
The megastructure is initiated as a spatial urbanism of the unpredictable fostering the relational needs (besoins relationelles) of its inhabitants. It is detached from the ground and extends in three-dimensional space offering a new technological substrate, which rejects the stable and the permanent and creates the ground for a multiplicity of personal hypotheses. The megastructure is a global man-made environment, a new artificial nature where even climatic conditions can be adjusted (what Dominique Rouillard refers to us urban climatization). This mega-scale climate conditioning gives an end to the human fight against a hostile nature, which was considered one of the fundamental raisons dʼexistence of architecture in the paradigm of modernist functionalism.

Larry Busbea interestingly points out that the spatial urbanism stems from a psychological drive to design and therefore control the networked, ultra-technological, undecipherable universe of flows which constituted the new landscape of human interactions in the postwar metropolis; Paris more specifically. If technology had become an Umwelt to use Van Lier’s words, then this Umwelt can be the new object of design, can be architecturalized and inhabited.
In the heavy, systematized structures of spatial urbanism rises the vision of a continuous immaterial world of flows. A world beyond spatial segmentations; a garden of Eden reclaimed through technology. As one can clearly see from the drawings of the megastructure the ultimate dream of the megastructure’s creators (Friedman, Otto, Fielitz, Zenetos) is for it to disappear, to become an invisible environment through its absolute ubiquity. This all pervasive technology contains all the constraints that ensure the viability of the system. What is designed here is a framework which allows for a multiplicity of subjectivities and gives space to free play without ever allowing the system to fail.
in the context of spatial urbanism, architecture is liberated from the the constant intervention of the experts by having all the fundamental constraints that ensure its viability detached from it and transposed in an outer layer, which conversely is an object condensing high technical knowledge and innovative expertise. Within it, architecture as we know it, in the scale of the building, is left to the taste and preferences of the individual. Within the spatial city, anything goes.

2. Architecture without architects: the FLATWRITER
However, after coming in contact with the proto-computational experiments, Yona Friedman starts envisioning a system for design empowerment, a tool which at the same time allows for self-planning within his all containing infrastructure and at the same time empowers individuals to create their own designs, without the mediation of the architect.
In his book Towards a Scientific Architecture, Friedman proposed a model where the desires of the users are expressed within a “repertoire” of computer generated possibilities situated within a containing infrastructure that carries all the necessary utilities. I discuss the details of this program in my paper Architecture-by-yourself: Early Studies in Computer Aided Participatory Design. Friedman claims that the use of the FLATWRITER establishes a new informational process reconciling the future user and the object that they use and allowing for a proclaimed limitless individual choice combined with the immediate chance to correct errors without the oversight of a professional paternalism.
In the second loop of the FLATWRITER Friedman sets out a programmatic outline of a process of self-planning based on a very general idea of loose zoning (efficiency lines). It is quite revealing that the countries which carried the legacy of the megastructure gave self planning a central role in their early computational visions. France and Italy (even after the wave of the megastructural dystopias) are the two exemplify this observation . Apart from Friedman, the Turin Center for the Study of Environmental Cybernetics, was conducting similar research in the 70s while advocating for the collective ownership of information and information processing.
However, what I also find of particular interest in Friedman’s program is the first loop: The users first create an associative graph of spaces by explicitly stating their desires. These desires are then evaluated in relation to “real-life” data, which have to do with a mapping of the user’s everyday habits (how many times one enters a room, what are the user’s most usual circulation patterns). In the case of conflicts between the user’s desires and the life patterns that resulting from this mapping, the program states the conflict and invites the user to reconsider their choices. The constitution of “objective” user behavior models and the establishment of occupancy patterns brings to mind current researches on sensor enhanced environments for behavior monitoring. One does not need to go far to think of projects such as the Newcastle University Culture Lab Ambient Kitchen project, incorporating the dimension of reflection on the way one actually inhabits space.With a hint of irony one could propose that this monitoring, which becomes subtler and subtler as sensor technologies progress, almost proposes a model of inverse phenomenology (!); making design decisions based on the room’s experience of the user. This is not very far from Cedric Price’s Generator project, of a space which rearranges itself based on the user’s behaviors and makes more informed choices based on the users’ reactions to these changes (more about this in the section about Frazer). Also, this is certainly not far away from Negroponte’s initial visions on the interaction of user and environment as they had been hinted towards in his thesis and elaborated on at the Architecture Machine. The FLATWRITER exemplifies the meeting point of the french spatial topologies and the cybernetic visions of the US. However, this contact did not leave the other side unaffected.

3. Architecture Machine(s): Your Surrogate You
Yona Friedman has used a mathematical scaffolding to support philosophical positions in a manner which affords the reader the opportunity to disagree with his utopian posture, but still benefit from his techniques. […] If you are a student you will find the paradoxical intersection of two academic streams – participatory design and scientific methods – too frequently held apart by the circumstances of our practice [10]
In the Architecture machine [11], Negroponte had already outlined paradigms of human-machine interaction within the design process, attributing to the computer the role of a problem worrying partner. A medium, which through its computational power can allow architects to reach a new humanism, addressing at the same time the very big and the very small and thus surpassing the reductionist averaging models used in prior architectural paradigms. This approach was primarily based on the assumption that the functions of communication, inference, understanding of the context and self improvement, will raise the machines to the level of valuable collaborators, not problem-solving artifacts, but problem-worrying partners of the designer. These improved versions of his self which would allow him to manage inconceivable complexities and stand critically in front of his own work, with beneficial results both for him and the user.

By 1975 Negroponte has already moved away from the vision of empowering the architect and has started formulating the vision of computation as a tool for user empowerment in design, influenced by the vision of an “architecture without architects”. This attitude is manifested in every possible way; in his introduction of Friedman’s Towards a Scientific Architecture, in the Introduction of Reflections on Computer Aids to Design and Architecture[12] where he explicitly mentions Friedman’s ideas as sources of inspiration for how to use computers in architecture and of course in his chapter “Computer aided participatory design” in Soft Architecture Machines.
In Negroponte’s visions the machine acquires connotations of a subject, in conversation with the user-designer. In his Soft Architecture Machines, the ecology of interconnected amplifiers combined with the discourse of a “surrogate you” brings back to the surface the previously discussed scheme of a technological ubiquity. However, this time the technological subject-object is not figured as an environment but as a collective body, with social and political connotations. The design amplifier is the representation of the individual in the collective system. The idea of a network of surrogate individuals, which however maintains the appearance of an one to one, personal relationship between the self and its own design amplifier, proposes a scheme where the machine becomes the space where the individual and the collective are unified.
It seems that the design amplifiers have a twofold function; they establish a ubiquitous network in scale which once more transcends the individual, while at the same time they become recognizable subjects; artifacts with which one can engage in conversation, can empathise with, can learn to know and be known. The process of thinking about thinking through engaging in conversation with one’s amplifier makes it also a tool for self reflection and education. The technological platform/object is portrayed as a subject with the knowledge of an architect (expert knowledge) but no will towards power. On the opposite the machine is establishes an empathic relationship with the user, it “learns” the user and starts injecting him/her with its embedded expertise, making them the architect.
Opposite to Alexander who saw computers as an army of uncreative clerks, Negroponte sees them as conversational machines democratizing design by engaging non experts in an educational and self reflective process; offering them a trip to “Designland”. John Frazer on the other hand sees computers as slaves of infinite power and patience and takes a distance from Negroponte’s approach which “placed high expectations on software and hardware none of which delivered really any answers”.

4. Evolutionary Architecture: Kits of changing parts
One could perhaps claim that Frazer’s Evolutionary Architecture does not quite fit the time frame or the thematics of this discussion. Indeed, the book was published in 1995, two decades after the time from which this discussion draws its references and at what one could call a time of -more at least- computational maturity. However, the Evolutionary Architecture is a condenser of thirty years of work, much of which draws its references from the cybernetics and more specifically Gordon Pask, who also prologues the book. In his foreword Pask sserts architecture as a “living, evolving thing”[13], proactive and culturally expressive at the same time, a condenser of the life of those who inhabit it. His vision is to use the computer not as an aid to design but as an evolutionary accelerator and a generative force: “A new form of designed artifact interacting and evolving in harmony with natural forces, including those of society”[14].
Frazer seldom explicitly discusses design democratization and user empowerment. However, the personalization of design through the interaction with an environment genetically programmed to be responsive to the movements of its inhabitants is a central theme in his book.
When it comes to stating a vision about architecture, Frazer outlines an intelligent environment, not stable like the crystalline structures of the spatial city, but responsive to the ever changing life it fosters. When on the other hand it comes to the technological tool, the computer is conceptualized as an electronic muse, a “genii in a bottle which can compress evolutionary space and time so that complexity and emergent architectural form are able to develop” [15]. More so than his architectural manifest, which can be seen as deeply influenced by the imaginary of Artificial Life, perhaps as a counterpoint to Negroponte’s Artificial Intelligence, what is interesting in Frazer’s book is his presentation of a repertoire for toolkits for design.
In most of the cases, these toolkits cubes with embedded sensors are used as an intuitive way for extracting fully developed architectural drawings and perspectives by playing in the physical world. Frazer characteristically refers to Cedric Price’s Generator project for which he had been asked to be the computational consultant. The Generator is a kit of parts allowing for spatial reconfigurations according to the desires of its users, where even the building itself would be able to register its own boredom and initiate processes of space rearrangements.
The implications of design participation and the discourse on the non expert are brought into the discussion only through the reference to the Walter Segal model, allowing people who knew nothing about architecture to build simple models based on surfaces and sticks through a physical toolkit and have the computer calculate the entire structure for them.

This prototyping approach, taking as input sketchy, hand on models from the user and translating them to expert views, is the dominant paradigm in current tools designed for the democratization of engineering offering the possibility of low floor input high ceiling output. An indicative example, but not the only one, in this direction is Fritzing, an electronics prototyping software, with views requiring increasing technical expertise.
Frazer however, denotes the limiting character of the kit of parts approach and advocates for a kit without the parts, or more specifically, a kit with parts which can also be subjects of evolution.
These toolkits are portrayed as form finding tools, providing the designer with constantly unpredictable stimuli and allowing for simulations of the phenotypes of the design’s genetic code under different conditions. The approach of a slave of infinite power and patience, evoking evoking responses to the designer through its endless generative potential and its possibility for simulation is very close to current tangents of computational visions.

In summer 2011 in the International Conference “Rethinking the Human in Technology Driven Architecture”, Kostas Terzidis referred to the computer as a new author in ways very similar to Frazer, while Manuel DeLanda proposed the combination of genetic programming, neural nets and multi-agent systems as the ultimate form finding tool for designers. The vision is quite simple: a tool which can with certainty expose all the possible solutions meeting certain constraints, which has the capability of learning one’s taste through every iteration and designer decision and finally is able to reconcile the local with the global by simulating different behavior patterns under specific general rulesets. The only parts of the process which demand a certain degree of expertise would in this case be the specification of the design requirements prior to the specification of the genetic code and the evaluation of the designs proposed by the computer patient slave.
The designer plays the role of the evaluator of the creative accidents of what in the bottom line is an unimaginative tool. Technology, again, becomes what we expect to surprise us.

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In this post I diagrammed three different approaches of design for empowerment for design and commented on fragments of their overlaps, disparities and conceptual continuities to affine contemporary discourses. Whether figured as an environment, subject or toolkit, the technological artifact (be it machine, space-structure or sensor enhanced physical modeling kits) is designed so as to encompass the necessary means of control ensuring the stability and adequacy of the system; be it structural, statistical or performative constraints. Ironically, however, all these proposals are architectural proposals, designed by architects so as to participate in the disciplinary discussion which they try to subvert. Nonetheless, I believe that the dissection and reshuffling of these figurations provide fertile diagrams for the re-conception of technology mediated design participation today, within the broader context of the democratization of/through technology.
For instance, as a thought experiment, when the environment is dematerialized/virtualized and can also be changed in real time, when even the platform can be collectively designed and destabilized then one can potentially conceive a scheme where these two models interact and retroact, contain and are contained within each other in a loop where collectivities design the environments of their interaction?

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Notes
[1] Alison and Peter Smithson quoted in Rouillard, D. Superarchitecture, le future de l’architecture 1950-1970. Paris: editions de la Villette, 2004
[2] Rouillard, D. Superarchitecture, le future de l’architecture 1950-1970. Paris: editions de la Villette, 2004
[3] op.cit 2, pp.83
[4] Busbea, L. Spatial Culture in France, 1960-1970. in Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970
[5] op.cit 4
[6] Friedman, Y. Utopies Realisables, Paris: L’ Eclat, 2000
[7] Negroponte, N. Soft Architecture Machines. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1975
[8] Frazer J.H., An Evolutionary Architecture, Architectural Association, London, 1995 download from http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications/ea/intro.html
[9] Friedman, Y. Toward a Scientific Architecture. (transl. Lang C.) Cambridge, MIT Press, 1975
[10] op.cit 9
[11] Negroponte, N. The Architecture Machine. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1970
[12] Negroponte, N. Introduction, Reflections on Computer Aids to Design and Architecture. Negroponte N. (editor), London, Mason/Charter Publishers, Inc., 1975, 1-13
[13] op.cit 8
[14] op.cit 8
[15] op.cit 8