THE POSSIBILITIES OF A DYNAMIC, RECONFIGURABLE ARCHITECTURE
How can the opening up of the system or acceptance of logic within automated landscapes lead to more dynamic architecture, fit for an ever-changing environment and constant acceleration?
Baudrillard already discussed the nucleic nature of the automated montage factories in the 1980s that were transplanted and acted as satellites within suburbs.[18] From a particular standpoint, the advantages of these self-operating systems, which used to be confined within the envelopes of their buildings, have already been utilized. The closed system appearance is entirely dissolved, once one sees the rationale of the surrounding environment, especially in the contexts of Chinese megacities, as the automated organizational principles have spilled outside of their confinements and now encompass whole cities and countries in the form of automated traffic systems, surveillance organization and construction processes, where they organize various flows and activities.[19]
This entity, overlaying both the streets and extending inwards within buildings, could be compared to a cybernetic organism, functioning according to a feedback loop. The acceptance of the open system reality would fully break down the constraints for the mobility of the space, calling for a design where buildings or structures are variable, with various parts of space being able to freely move around and adjust according to the reasoning of the automation. The dangers, the never-ceasing rationalization attempts or the possible attack on free will by this cybernetic entity are issues that this essay does not discuss, focusing only on one of the possibilities of harnessing its logic.
In their current state, the landscapes of automated organizations possess various qualities that allow them to prosper and advance. Their automated reconfigurability could be embraced and applied for structures fitting the digital age, establishing a new system of values with an emphasis on information utility. The implementation of such systematic principles could be an answer to Martin Pawley’s inquiries about the terminal state of the architecture more than 25 years ago, as the possibilities of the reconfigurability of these structures would commit to both changing the spaces and time.[20] Pawley concurred with Toyo Ito, who posited that the emergence of new media in architecture would eliminate the possibility of a fixed, static form.
The organizational principles borrowed from the landscapes of automated organization could suggest the distortion of space in a quite literal manner, not virtually and with the help of electronic imagery, as Pawley anticipated, but with a mechanical movement of the elements, where the optimal placement or form of objects and spaces would be determined by information collected within the system and its connective networks, with the movement and change facilitated by the technology already employed in the previously mentioned structures. If the urban environment is epitomized by its ever-changing nature and acceleration of elements within, the same dialectics could extend within all the presently static structures.