an emergent interface

Truth be told, my undergraduate education at berkeley has mainly consisted of doing, building, tasks that involved making. Exposure to various contemporary architectural theories, on the other hand, has been very limited. My understanding of various 'hot' words like sustainability, or emergence, is from banter among students, which in most cases result in misunderstanding the word, or only gaining a fraction of its true meaning. Studio instructors might encourage certain books/readings, but most of those are design examples and precedence that will help a student's design and production. Arch 130 is the only core-class that broadly covers theory, but it doesn't reach contemporary theory. And even then, it is not a required class - I for one, chose to take Arch 140, 150, and 160 instead, classes that focused on lighting, structure, and construction. Last semester in Anthony Burke's and Bob Shepherd's 101, the instructors actually set aside time for critical discourse of what came close to theoretical, since the studio, 'Protocology', was an experimental one. In addition we had a fairly active blog that allowed students to voice their thoughts and questions. For me, this was one of the few times that I had a chance to 'discuss', and even then the conditions were far from ideal. This is not to say I have any regrets about my education, afterall, design is a highly hands-on field. But the fact is, academic/theoretical discourse in the architecture program simply does not exist, double-especially for undergraduates.

Having said that, it has been unexpected to be given the chance to pick at just 12 words for the whole semester. My initial skepticism gave way to the realization that each of these words was an entry point into a much greater network of knowledge that could be explored. The words themselves are mere words, but the ideas and theories that they related to, is the real meat of the course - and juicy is the meat. No other course has clarified for me so much the influences of the last century that have more or less directly led us to our current perspectives and situations - from the overwriting vision of a few good men as the progenitors of 'Modern', to Bucky's responsibility for popularizing 'system' and synergy, to Mclauhan who completely altered the way we understood media. But even more important, is the state of the immediate and eventual future. In this regard, my two words of choice are Emergence and Interface.

Emergence is a popular word in contemporary architecture, and one that I've misunderstood for quite some time. But for the first time I can understand it as a way of thinking about not just architecture, but the very nature of systems, or problems. The idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts breaks the limits of conventional problem solving approaches like multi-variable equations and statistical analysis. Also the notion of growth is embedded in the word, through which the evolutionary change of say, animals, or cities, can be interpreted. With growth also comes change, and the idea of metamorphosis, as a means for a dynamic model for the built environment.

Part of me believes that architecture cannot escape the influence of modernism completely in the physical domain, such that the experiential and the virtual domains become fertile grounds for the generation and maturation of new ideas. Without the restraint of the physical, the built environment takes on a whole new form and function. Just the same, the role of the architect would be forever changed. Virtual environments could eventually render the physical existence obsolete, and that is when 'interface' would encompass everything. While the idea is a bit far-fetched (or not), as a society we are increasingly 'plugged-in' to all sorts of media. The architect cannot ignore the ability of media to create new experiences, and perhaps, slowly the the role of the architect will shift towards designing the interface? Or as Frazier calls it, 'code-script' - for an input based architecture that will allow the resultant to evolve and adapt. For me these exciting territories are definitely worth exploring.