Bionetworks: Distributed Forms of Collaborative Practice in Architecture

While much attention has been focused upon the influence of emerging digital technologies on architectural form, virtually nothing has examined its far broader implications for forms of architectural practice. Yet, as with modernism and the professionalization of architecture at the end of the 19th century, as well as the rise of architectural corporations such as SOM in the mid-20th century, the future of architectural design will inevitably depend upon the reconfiguration of architectural authorship in the wake of new technologies. Just as centralized computing was replaced by theemergence of the Internet, decentralizing corporate organizations and eventually open-source communities such as the Gnutella file-sharing network, digital technology is transforming the way architects, designers, artists, and musicians can organize their practices and thus reconfigure the objects of that practice.Bionetworks: Distributed Forms of Collaborative Practice in Architecture, will demonstrate that architectural objects and processes are irrelevant outside new manifolds of production made possible by new regimes of productivity. Today, the most compelling architecture is emerging from bionetworks: robust but supple, open affiliations of actors, technologies and products that continuously modulate flows of information as a new form of life. Most importantly for architecture, bionetworks allow for the emergence of new agencies outside the persona of an individual genius and his centralized office or the bureaucratic hierarchies of corporate identities. Instead, constellations of experimental, international, and cross-disciplinary, decentralized, collaborative organizations are now emerging, repositioning architecture to engage unconventional problems, briefs, clients, and manufacturing processes.More than a survey, Bionetworks will itself be produced through a bionetwork organization; it will embody bionetwork principles by interfacing a series of case studies of emerging firms with theoretical and historical references. Moreover, exciting young practices and reconfigurations of already recognized names will encounter examples drawn from other fields of cultural production. The result will be an exploration of the future of architecture in forms scarcely resembling either known objects or practices. There are two related points of interest that I believe make this a topic of particular interest to the question of globalization. The first has to do with a larger geo-political context that extends beyond the immediate vicinity of architecture. The Internet is radically reconfiguring a variety of contemporary cultural practices. One manifestation has been the rise of unusually effective protest organizations newly empowered by the ability to network virtually. In the global protests of February 2002 or the WTO protests that preceded it, organizations like moveon.org were able to mobilize people in numbers previously unimaginable. Moreover, the Internet fosters new forms of practice not necessarily political in origin, but which eventually become political by way of the threat they pose to traditional models of organization. The most famous example is the effect of Napster on the recording industry, essentially challenging the latter by transforming the way music is produced, distributed, and consumed. Initially an improvised basement programming experiment eventually dismantled through a series of legal battles, the concept Napster posed about new forms of distribution has been adopted as a legitimate business model, for example in Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The power and very real implications of these virtual network infrastructures is made apparent by the recent assault of the American Music Association on peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella. In these events, concepts and realities of property, authorship, distribution, and audience are being radically contested. This essay will explore similar implications for the authorship, reception, and economies of architectural production, suggesting that new types of products can emerge by transforming the modes of practice. I’ll argue that such re-skilling and transformation are essential if architecture is to remain vitally engaged in 21st century cultural and social developments. In regards to the latter, there are a number of authors currently writing on this subject and several recent books that portray these ongoing transformations. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s seminal book Empire has become important reading in a variety of academic and professional contexts in regards to the above examples. Other examples include Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution and Mark C. Taylor’s The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, not tomention the by now widely recognized research of Saskia Sassen.Secondly, and closer to the immediate realm of architecture, there are similar signs of a significant shift in contemporary forms of practice. Yet until now, there has been no focused forum for the articulation and examination of these broad but specific developments. Increasingly, young design firms emerging from architecture school are capitalizing on the Internet as a site of collaboration by situating themselves in multiple locations and developing affiliations beyond their immediate borders. Being global no longer seems fantastic but is immediately attainable, even essential. OCEAN was an early experiment in this endeavor and has been followed more recently by such practices as servo, Atelier Chronotope, and RAMTV to name only a few. At the same time new forms of international collaboration between previously discrete architectural identities have arisen. One example is the collaboration of the architect Stan Allen and landscape architect James Corner as Field Operations. More recently the collaborative venture United Architects was catalyzed by the World Trade Center competition. This group is comprised of Greg Lynn, UN Studio, FOA, Reiser+Umemoto, and Kevin Kennon, and was organized as a form of collaboration to explicitly counter the failure of either the proposals produced by large corporate offices or single identity architects. Beyond this competition, UA continues to develop work as an international collaborative practice, reflecting a shift from singular and centralized identities and models of practice to multiple and decentralized ones. Bionetworks will be the first sustained cross-examination of these and other practices—and new types of architectural products that arise therein—all the while linking them to broader social transformation as expressions of a singular historical development linked to far broader biopolitical, social, and technological transformations.Finally, and within the context of the issues mentioned above, this essay will address the topic of globalization by focusing on the complex relationship of the global to the local. At each scale of investigation within the essay, ranging from larger geo-political topics to those more specific to architectural practice and production, I will argue that globalization itself is a problematic term in that it implies a complete homogenization of identity and practice and a resultant loss of the local. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest in their book Empire, the globalization they see as giving rise to new forms of cultural production are in fact not global, but rather situated somewhere between the global and the local. If one were to wonder about a space of globalization one might imagine a space in which the local plays an equally important role as the global.

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8