defining hackable architecture

Hackable Architecture

How do you make architecture that is adaptable?

Think of platforms, not solutions - overbuild infrastructure, underbuild features

Build with an architecture of layers; enable fast layers to change rapidly (learning); slower layers enable stability

Create seamful experiences, based around behaviour not aesthetics; often includes modular design

Undesigned products, or rather not overdesigned; to invite the user in, to encourage evolution

Define vocabularies, or basic patterns of interaction

Leave space to evolve (if physical/spatial, build with modular shapes which can extend easily

Enable users to manage the at-hand information and interactions; the surface layers

Create an aesthetic of ongoing process

This process implies that the designer provides support, engagement over time etc.

"Spaces and Events" - Bernard Tschumi

QUESTION: 
Can space be separated from event?


HISTORY:
70s - "Architects become mere decorators when parts of developer led teams designing large buildings." "Architectural critics concentrate on surface readings, signs, metaphors, and other modes of presentation."

80s - Architects rejected program as just part of failed functionalist theories. Instead they occupied themselves with what Tschumi describes as "a form of decorative painting."

Architecture became a collection of architects with no collected direction, each just standing by their own beliefs.

"The restricted notion of postmodernism that ensued--a notion diminished by comparison with literature or art---completely and uncritically reinserted architecture into the cycle of consumption."

REACTION:
A blending of verbal and visual discourse was initiated at the AA. Methods and media not used in the field at the time created a new way to study the overlap between visual and verbal. Photography and film as well as text and manifesto were all used as part of the projects. The new media formats and their overlayment produced "a complex juxtaposition of abstract concepts and immediate experiences, contradictions, superimpositions of mutually exclusive sensibilities." The use of narratives as program came out of the products of superimposition. Instead of using something static, a narrative would create a frame for events and spaces to interact. In this case the narrative was a piece of literature.

While literature uses vocabulary and grammar structures to mold ideas and narratives, architecture has the ability to control events using spatial rules like juxtaposition or distortion.

Since events and programs can be manipulated, the relationship between program and building can be explored.


To explain these new relationships between space and event drawing had to find new methods of representation: the hybrid drawing is born. It examines the middle place between two drawings and how they relate. These drawings seek a response to the program examined. At this point the drawings, which still represent architecture, become the boldest embodiment of the event within the architecture.


ANSWER:
Architecture is the "assemblage" of space and event.