I suggested in my last (first) post that I was looking at the concept of hacking as a way forward in my research - a possible mission statement for a project that knows what it is about but not necessarily what it is in service to. So it seemed appropriate that this post should expand on that idea a little bit; clarify, if not exactly what I mean, then at least the general thrust of my inquiry.
“Hacking” itself is a fraught term: it is widely understood to refer to rogue internet users dedicated to defeating and dismantling network security protocols for profit or infamy; this is a too-narrow definition. The original hackers were far from criminal – they were the individuals who, coming out of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, helped birth the Internet. Another application of the term describes hobbyists and tinkerers, like those who in the 1970’s invented modern personal computing in their garages (most famously Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates). Both groups are comprised of individuals who, as an early glossary of web subculture defines it, “delight in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system…” (G. Malkin, Network Working Group: Request for Comments 1392)
What this history suggests is that those willing to experiment with new systems are those best positioned to radically reimagine the ways in which those systems interface with our daily lives. This is no less true in design than it was in communication or computer hardware. Hacking, here, is not an act but an ethos.
And it is an ethos that is catching on in architecture: in software, Bob McNeel made the decision to open his software, Rhinoceros, to plugins by open-source developers. David Rutten, meanwhile, has pioneered open-source parametrics through his Grasshopper environment for Rhinoceros, spawning a global community of independent hacker-developers. Individuals like Marc Fornes of theverymany are bringing fabrication technologies into their practice, designing to the limits of what it is possible to build. There is also a push to literally bridge the gap between the computational environment and the spatial environment through interactivity, as shown in the work of firms such as Studio Roosegaarde in Rotterdam, a flourishing multi-national practice dedicated to this topic.
These examples (which only scratch the surface) prove that there is no shortage of hacking in architecture, but it remains unclear what these physical and computational experiments are doing, other than testing their own viability. I argue that this viability is no longer in question; we must widen our scope to include more than the mere pursuit of novelty.
Our hacker’s “delight in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system” must move beyond the computer systems on our desks and the fabrication systems in our shops, into the realm of the social and cultural systems we live and labor within, which are no less amenable to the ethos of the hacker than any other. Here we might begin to see a new type of hacking take shape, one that is distinctly architectural. This is what I mean when I say spacehacking.
As Frank Apunkt Schneider and Gunther Friesinger put it in their essay “Urban Hacking as a Practical and Theoretical Critique of Public Spaces”:
…a poetics of urban space…is, therefore, fully aware of (local) signs’ and symbols’ molecular significance for the whole of the order. The supremacy of this order’s structures can no longer be attacked by a form of (fantasmatic) revolution. At most, they can be challenged by an aesthetic praxis, in a guerilla war of representations.
This idea, of a “guerilla war of representations” has me totally fascinated: how do we parse the meanings of the things we see every day, how can we begin to resist and subvert those meanings which we identify as harmful? Whatever the answer, it seems to me that if the examples shown above have anything, they have a visual presence and aesthetic force, the very things needed to compete in this new struggle for our cities.
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