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By Root 470 0

a profession, architecture has been assuming that this is going to happen for quite awhile now. The design press of the 1990s was saturated with such visions. Anyone who regularly read Metropolis or wallpaper or ID in those years will likely remember a stream of blobjectified buildings, all nurbly and spliny, with tightly-kerned Helvetica Neue wrapped around the corners to represent "interactive surfaces," and images of Asian women sleekly coutoured in Jil Sander Photoshopped into the foreground to connote generic urban futurity.* But the role played by networked information in such projects mostly seemed to mean some variation on Web-on-the-wall.

* Architects: I kid. I kid, because I love.

For all the lovely renderings, we have yet to see the appearance of buildings structurally modified in any significant way by the provision of realtime, networked information.

Yet since the 1970s, it has been commonplace of commercial architecture and engineering, at least, that information technology allows impressive efficiencies to be realized when incorporated in the design of buildings. It is now rare for a new, premium commercial building to break ground without offering some such provision.

Circulation and delivery of services in so-called "smart buildings" can be tuned in real time, in pursuit of some nominal efficiency profile. Instead of stupidly offering an unvarying program of light, heat, and air conditioning, energy management control systems (EMCS) infer appropriate environmental strategies from the time of day and of year, solar gain, and the presence or absence of occupants. And security and custodial staffs are assisted in their duties by the extension of computational awareness throughout the structure. It would be a stretch to call such systems "routine," but only just barely.

Other computationally-enhanced building systems are becoming increasingly common, like Schindler Elevator's Miconic 10, which optimizes load by aggregating passenger groups based on where they're going. Instead of the time-honored principle of pressing an "up" button, and then waiting in a gaggle with all the other upbound passengers, the Miconic 10's clever load-optimization algorithm matches people bound for the same floor with the elevator cab currently offering the shortest wait time. (It's simpler to do than it is to explain.) Schindler claims the elevators make each individual trip 30 percent faster, and also allow a building to handle a proportionally increased flow of visitors.*

* What gets lost, though, in all of this—as with so many digitally "rationalized" processes—is the opportunity for serendipitous interaction that happens when people from different floors share this particular forty-five-second interval of the day. Isn't the whole cherished trope of the "elevator pitch" based around the scenario of a kid from the mailroom finding him-or herself willy-nilly sharing a cab with the CXO types headed for the executive floors?

When such systems are coupled to the relational, adaptive possibilities offered up by everyware in its other aspects, we start to get into some really interesting territory. The Arch-OS "operating system for architecture," for example, a project of the School of Computing, Communications and Electronics at the University of Plymouth, suggests some of the possible directions. As its Web site explains, the project aims to capture the state of a building in real time from inputs including "building energy management systems...the flow of people and social interactions, ambient noise levels and environmental conditions," and return that state to public awareness through a variety of visualizations.

While there's ample reason to believe that such ambient displays of information relating to building systems will become both prevalent and useful, most of the Arch-OS projects to date lean toward the artistic. While it sounds fascinating, for example, it's unclear from the project's documentation whether the "psychometric architecture" project—the recording of activity in a building throughout the day, for playback