Coffee Break

IT REVOLUTION

But if we turn the question around, everything becomes clear. Design in relation to space is architecture but it is an architecture, depending on the case, needs and limitations, that uses different materials. From hard and permanent to light materials made of water, vegetation, reflections and light. This type of reasoning opens up a whole range of activities to the designer that, depending on the case and need, multiplies the possibilities of the project.



"Depending on the case and need" means, for example, that when the architect cannot build a wall of stone, he can build one with a spray of water; when he wants to redirect flows and lines, he can do it with a painting or projection (if we do not wish to use ancient obelisks); when he needs a new spatiality, he could perhaps use fabrics, curtains, or if he really needs them he can dig his spaces out of the earth or hang them in mid-air like a balloon.

Naturally, I knew that, in this expanded idea of design with a palette of light materials, the computer was a necessary tool in a thousand ways. But I could show very little in this direction beyond that great and brilliant forerunner Toyo Ito and something from the prophetic Jean Nouvel. The first merit of this book is in greatly expanding the number of examples and their operational and theoretical substrata, the second is in contributing to making concrete a new idea of the contemporary city. 



Electronics and information technology systems can in fact furnish tools for the development of those "anti-zoning" areas around which modern life tends more and more to be arranged. Aside from being multi-functional zones (with activities that are productive, recreational, social and, in some cases, even residential) and helping in the needed return to nature in outlying areas frequently built with brutality and an insane density, they must, in order to actually function, have a nervous system made of technology, or rather information technology. This means systems of interactive control, of illumination, of "information" in the real sense. Only then will we have city sectors open to that multifunctionality and plurality of use that is the promise of the information technology civilization. 

The problem as always is "how". For years Ranaulo has studied and applied precisely this idea to numerous designs. While going through the text you will also find many designs by artists, landscape artists and architects who move through this new territory heavily traveled by the light of information.



Miracles of Information Technology.
Paul Virilio, and this quote is compulsory since this book gives concrete form to many of the French thinker's theories, spoke of the Electronic Gothic.

Architecture is becoming a support for information, not to mention an advertising support and, in a broader sense, a mass media support […] The Electronic Gothic of media buildings illuminates the crossroads –Times Square for example– in the same way that, in the Gothic cathedral, stained glass windows illuminated the nave or the presbytery to tell the story of the Church... time is no longer the time of a sequence alternating between day and night, but a time of immediacy, of instantaneousness and ubiquity; in other words, it possesses what in the past were the attributes of divinity.
(From an interview by François Burkhardt published as an article in the first issue of Crossing).

Today, architecture and information technology go beyond the Electronic Gothic of the illuminating macro-object (the cathedral, much like a symbolic tower, in Bilbao of which I have spoken on other occasions) to once again directly face the issue of the urban setting. This happens not only because we have new tools for conceiving space (palimpsests, layers, dynamic diagrams, in-between spaces, emerging forms, etc.) but because the real and the virtual can now be combined in a manner once unheard of. As this book shows, this refers to the development of projection systems almost inside the shell itself of the building that give the effect of a sort of new, mass-media illusionism. So we can look forward to an Information Era Baroque, with its new Piazza Navonas, new Trevi Fountains and new Trinità dei Monti of 2006; in other words, a new, interactive urban choreography.

Ranaulo rightly tends to emphasize the technical aspect rather than the superficial scenic backdrop: the use of new types of glass that show rear projections but that during the day remain alive and transparent (and not drab, turned-off screens); the use of very thin marble that not only covers buildings but receives projected images at the same time; how to connect water or vegetation to computerized information networks, transforming them physically (nebulization for example, or vaporization or condensation, etc.); and how to contain information in these new ethereal supports. In other words, a job that is also difficult, with technical engineering that reminds us of the work behind the facades of Versailles or Caserta, a lot of subterranean construction (building dams, digging canals, pumping systems, etc.) without which nothing would have seen the light.

In summary, this book, with its illustrative material, highlights three aspects worth remembering; aspects the reader quickly notices.
1. No qualitative difference exists in the methods used by architecture. Instead of doing a very costly renewal of an old urban landmark, such as a skyscraper, sprays of nebulized water can be set up around it on which images are projected. This revives the area, can be performed at very low cost and opens a new informational space for everyone since both the revolt of the poor as well as the success of the rich can be projected on those rings.
2. There is no longer any difference between first level communication (the architecture itself that is transformed into an object of information) and second level communication (i.e. information technology systems that rely on screens that are "added" to the building). The building as a whole becomes a communicative vector and architectural object at the same time.
3. Finally, no difference exists between design in the city center or outlying areas. The information and projection systems presented in this book indicate practical solutions that regard just as much those "black holes" in abandoned urban areas as they do those nerve centers of old cities or even archeological sites.

In short, "No design limits" means that, thanks to electronics, we can help open up the city to the complex intellectual and technical procedure called architectural design that makes up a significant framework in present day reality. And our awareness of reality, that now may have several components considered in the past as belonging to divinity (as mentioned in that enlightened observation quoted earlier) is seen in our, still astonished, gazes.

Antonino Saggio