Brute Force Architecture
by Bryan Boyer
14 May 2012

How Rem Koolhaas’s OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture) rewired their office in the late 1990s into a brute force creative machine.

One method stands out: blue foam

New and faster ways to evaluate architectural proposals were needed, namely new means of drawing and model making that shortened the time it required to definitively say yes or no. The answer was blue foam.

OMA is famous for its use of blue foam as a model making material, a technique that uses polystyrene foam cut into desired shapes with a heated wire. Working with foam is a skill that one learns relatively quickly and it allows quick and easy iterations that would be more time consuming to achieve in cardboard. For instance, making a cube from foam can be done with as few as two or three cuts. The same shape out of cardboard would require 24 cuts and the gluing of 6 pieces. Whereas working with cardboard requires planning ahead and some translation of ideas into a workflow of making, with foam the workflow and ideas are collapsed into one. Making is thinking.

One can picture the spark that must have lit up in the eye of a young model maker as their tired fingers parted with a bright yellow Olfa knife and embraced the electrically charged wire of a foam cutter, slicing effortlessly through a block of cool blue foam for the first time.

Working with foam instead of more traditional materials allowed the design teams at OMA to model their ideas quicker, which in turn allowed more ideas to be considered in the same span of time. The adoption of this new technique was akin to upgrading the processor speed of the office.

More so than cardboard or other model making materials, blue foam erases the signature of its creator allowing for an easier ‘apples to apples’ comparison. The anonymizing uniformity of the cut surfaces and alien blueness of the foam itself allowed multiple workers to prepare options in parallel without the differences of personal craft becoming an element of distraction during moments of evaluation. The cumulative effect means that a table covered in foam models all produced by different individuals can be assessed for their ideas rather than the quirks of who made them or how they were created. What’s on display are the ideas themselves, without any distracting metadata or decoration. This is the model making equivalent of Edward Tufte’s quest to eliminate chartjunk.

With extraneous degrees of difference eliminated from the process, the signal to noise ratio of the discussion could be as high as possible.

A new series City Of Sound (@cityofsound) are curating for Italian design magazine Domus, proposing a different kind of tech journalism that recognises technology as a cultural production - and, more than that, as the firmament of our culture.

A few years ago, in response to the usual diminished depiction of contemporary technology as simply “IT”, someone—I forget who—said something like “Is a 14 year-old girl updating her Facebook status from her mobile phone as she walks down the street ‘IT’?” Of course it is, but more importantly, it isn’t. It is more than that; contemporary technology is deeply cultural

. We might argue that all technology always has been “deeply cultural”, from the Stone Age axe onwards, but given that symbolic consumption and production—one definition of culture—is now actively and deliberately embedded in objects we design and build, and that these objects are embedded in the patterns, habits and rituals of everyday life—another definition of culture—we must now see technology for what it is.

So with Domus, Joseph Grima and I saw an opportunity to write in a different way about everyday technology. Domus has a long tradition of writing about such things, driven by the strong Italian heritage of post-war industrial design, covering Brionvega radios, Elica hoods, Vespa scooters, or Olivetti typewriters, for instance.

But as I suggest in my series opener (below), perhaps a culturally powerful contemporary equivalent of these things now exists in the form of social media, mobile phones, web services, information graphics, smart cards, personal informatics, robots, and so on.

It might be a stretch to suggest that these things are the equivalent of an Olivetti Valentine in a number of ways, but not in terms of the way such things now shape our lives. Yet the vast bulk of journalism concerning this everyday technology is dominated by the technology press, which is rarely critical in the sense that Domus is, rarely covers design aspects with any depth, and rarely attempts to place developments in a wider cultural context. While I have no problem with the likes of Engadget, Techcrunch, Wired and the rest—not that they’d notice either way if I did!—there did seem a gap in the market here.

Conversely, this was also a way to introduce discussion of the recent design disciplines of interaction design, experience design, service design and information design, to this more established strata of design media. For what it’s worth, my motive for doing this—discussing the technology in terms of culture, and discussing its design in the context of other design practices—is in order to try to understand it better; which is in turn in order to design it better, to realise it better, to procure it better.

A very exciting development - one I’m glad is freely available on the Domus website, and one I hope to learn from. As a social researcher by training, this type of “critical design” thinking is quite new to me - though dare I say it was something I was looking for and often found lacking while studying architectural theory during my Masters! (UCL, urbanism).

When back from SXSW I hope to read and absorb the first two articles more thoroughly:

1. Portable Cathedrals on the Nokia N9… and the hegemonic power of Apple, the importance of materials, tactility, sounds and ocularcentrism, European design history and entrepreneurship, and the skirmishes of licensing and logistics in the mobile phone market.

2. In Praise of Lost Time on Facebook Timeline… and “information design, social graphs, identity and representation, and so on —but also the broader context of a shared social memory, and how that might affect the way we forget and function.”

Serious stuff!

Design researcher & tech anthropologist Jan Chipchase was questioned at the Pop!Tech conference about the ethics of doing his kind of work.

» What is it like working for BigCorps pillaging the intellect of people around the world for commercial gain?

» How do you sleep at night as the corporations you work for pump their worthless products into the world?”

As he says, “There are a number of misconceptions about consumers in highly income/resource constrained (poor) communities that seem to repeat themselves with a depressing regularity and is often directed from passionate minds with a particular, accusatory venom:”

» Consumers on low levels of income are incapable of making rational or “right” choices for themselves

» These same consumers are duty bound only to make rational choices (“rational” as in on things that have an immediate benefit to their current socio-economic situation, as defined by the person making the argument)

» Any time a consumer makes an “irrational” choice the “fault” lies with the company providing the products

» Companies that target consumers in countries with very low levels of income are inherently evil

As any anthropologist will immediately see, these are a patronising set of assumptions unable to allow that people on low incomes (people not “consumers”, Jan!) can think for themselves - which Jan rebuts clearly and in depth, with lots of great examples from his work.

Well worth a read.