design by necessity ⎜ a Cape Town log

Cape Town. A story I wrote in september.

A log on the return from an intense design and fabrication week. We were to design homes for poor people in Cape Town. Some see this as a humanitarian opportunity, some see this as a justice mission. I see this as a simple help. A simple back to the root design. A simple, “can we make the best out of the least?” design assigment. I don’t have a lot of emotions but I have a certain sense of ethics.

One of the main beauty, I guess, of this project, and we made almost like a vow on it, is: minimum means for maximum impact. We questioned: what is the consequences of our actions? Is it saving some kids, giving them a brighter future? Is it giving some people a mean for survival? Is it giving them the opportunity to not burn in a widespead fire? – it is an ethical question. Would it be superior than fulfilling some dude or dudess’s will for a posh villa? Maybe, maybe not. But at least, for my part, designing the Cape Town project had a higher priority. Maybe because somehow, personally, I have been once or twice or several time in the emotional and physical dirt. Maybe I shared the misery of these people: not knowing if you’re going to survive the winter because you have no home. Not knowing if you’re going to survive the week because of a lot of reasons.

So there we were, with my good friend Sam, thinking about the project. We were amazed, no, amazed is a big word, intrigued by the ability of people to customise their home, to bounce back and to build. The home is not what they need. They can build it very well on their own. What they need is social structure and infrastructure.

The social structure to build trust. To let their kids to go to school. To stop their young adults to do too much (some is not too bad) drugs. But that is not our job. As architects, we are limited to the physical. Then the thing that crossed my minds was: how the fuck do we stabilise the situation? How the fuck can we provide and upgrade what they can not get? The answer was infrastructure. Out of all my times being wandering through the world, I learned my lessons. I know what a homeless needs. Warmth, some shelter, a place to transform your found food, toilets, a shower… The base on which you can start other things.

Designing the infrastructure was a mean to allow people to be independent, to grow on their own. You don’t want to sit next to them and assisting them all the time when a storm tore down their homes. I could but, too bad, I have other things to do. So the idea came about a rigide fire proof core, within which we put everything a human being would need: sanitary, kitchen, water and solidity. The people didn’t accept the idea in the first phase: NO! you need to design the house! We would reply: we don’t want to fucking build something that on the next day, the whole shit would dissapear by a fire. If you do something like that, you will always live in fear, you will always live on moving sands. You have no means to grow.

The idea went through. We designed the thing. We build the thing by our own hands. Cutting wood, welding steel, screwing pieces. I was amazed by the ability of a human to care: we care about somebody we never met, some place we’ve never beeen to and some issues we’ve never seen. I was also amazed by how much resistance the matter put against you once you want to transform it: cutting steel is not like cutting a piece of cake.

 The main lesson that I drew out of this, as we sat for a long time discussing it through with Sam, is: minimalism is not in the design. Don’t be fooled by the clean and sterile forms that surround us. Minimalism is in the action. Regardless of the form you make, always go the essential. It would actually be called essentialism. Always go to what you need to do and the end result will be beautiful. Embrace complexity, embrace construction and putting a lot of pieces together. Once we are honest about the project, without over doing or wanting to hide something, I guess we are on the right path. In short, do the right thing with the essential means.

virtual reality as an art form

I remember being 9-10 years old or so, discovering what was in the mid 90s the first 3D engine, ever.  I remember it to be made by the Voodoo FX, by John Carmack, the creator of ID software. It was a revolution. It was ugly as hell but it was super exciting. It marked a shifting point of what was to come, what we are doing now, Rhino, Maya, Alias you name it. I made my first “photo realistic” render in 1997. It was… ultra futuristic.

 Back then, virtual reality was far fetched, I remember that the pixels were so ugly that it made me dizzy. Virtual reality was helped a lot by our own imagination to make something believable. You have to imagine what those 4 floating pixels were laser beams, or a building, or a human.

 Fast forward, last year, I’ve rediscovered video games, again. After no less than 10 years. Beginning with – Mass Effect, which, as I had no time to waste, I had to pick because of the sophisticated story telling and a more “intelligent” than average game mechanics. The thing blew my mind. It was so freaking believable. You ARE commander of an intergalactic fleet saving the galaxy. The immersion is unbelievably real, compared to the 1995 times. It made me see new things that I didn’t think about before: at some point, you are walking perpendicular to the axis of gravity, descending to the generator of an enormous satellite. It is an extra vehicular walk, upside down. I don’t remember the last time I did that. It was absolutely mind blowing.

 Virtual reality and video games are still a black sheep, a subject of controversy. Mainly, the people opposing it are either old people or parents or the sorts. It is still not very mainstream. People are still considering it “a waste of time in an useless universe”. Thruth is humans have always played games. Chess, Go, dancing, businesses, sexual attraction. They are all forms of games. We are wired to like the interaction between challenges and reward. Nature’s call. Games are natural and they are part of who we are. Video games are just a form and derivative of it.

 I might be biased, but the need for story telling an expression has always been there. The need for fantasy and imagination has always been there: caveman’s painting, Shakespeare’s poems, Cubrick’s movies, you name it. I wouldn’t understand why, but it’s probably because our brain and understanding is faster than nature. It is easier for our brain to imagine moving a cup than moving the cup itself, hence the need for imagination.

 Imagination is so inseparable from reality that we can’t really tell what is real and what is not. I mean, it looks like a very simplistic definition, but can you tell me what is real and what is not? Your iPhone is real, but its content is not. But the line is very blurred. We live in a digital age. And we should treat the digital datas and medium with respect. Even Leibnitz figured out, back then, that we all live in our own bubbles of subjectivity.

 Some while ago, some old dude who is an art critic, argued that video games are not an art form. Yeah, of course, he’s like 80 something and ultra conservative. But hey, let’s trace the beginning of cinema: it was ridiculous, it was making a train run towards people. It was not art. But look at it now: it is awesome. Photography at the beginning was quite shitty. But look at it now: we don’t spend a day without using it. But I believe that virtual reality is one of the best artform available.

 But all these artforms lack one thing: interaction. I mean not passive interaction such as trying to imagine what the author wanted to picture with his text. Or interpretating a painting. I personnally am a bit unsophisticated and not very subtle, so these subtleties are really hard for me to understand. I mean, what is so awesome about a entirely blue painting? Might be me, but I am bored and I don’t look at it for more than 3 seconds. The same goes for “abstract” painting.

 This might be a personal argument, but I find the real world, except from adventurous experiences, quite boring. It is always about the same petty thing: buy food, eat food, drink stuffs, swallow stuffs, talk to people about always the same subjects, laugh the same jokes, do the same jobs. Take football: Really? 22 dudes running after a ball? It might be fun, but… how interesting is it? Sometimes adventure and novelty comes along. But less frequent than I would like. I don’t go fly airplanes every week end. I don’t go skiing every (well, might be) week ends either.

 What virtual reality offers you, and why the industry has grown much faster than any industry before it, is this: an interactive experience in a imaginary world. Interactivity, as for now, is low level: keyboard, mouse and screen. Quite unexciting. But if we imagine a scenario where you entire body is engaged: you can touch the imaginary world, feel it and see it in peripheral vision. How would that be? Imagination is the best thing about humanity. You could, for the duration of fifteen hours be, in your mind, and in your body, the commander of the inter galactic fleet saving the galaxy. Or whatever experience you want to live. How awesome is that? Very.

 So with the idea that, for the brain, there is no difference between imagination and the real world, then, building the real world and the virtual world is equally important, it is like building for the body and for the brain.  I would personally argue that it is more important to build the land of imagination than the real world. As an architect, I would really like to experiment in building both, because both are equally rich and they inform one another. If we incorporate real world culture in the virtual world, it could be a extremely interesting way to distribute knowledge. Example: teach children ethics through an adventure game.

 The danger of this future is real world neglect. At some point, virtual reality is going to be so awesome, that we will get stuck in it. Neglecting what ever is real. Also social problems come along. But I don’t have the answers for that.

 So, in short, I believe that interactive virtual reality is heading  in to a very awesome direction, it is a medium that we literally invented in a decade. The question is: what do we want to do with it? How well do we want to design these worlds that we created within our minds? My answer is: take it as an ally, like we took good books as allies, like we took good movies as allies. But I believe that if we push the boundaries further, this medium is one of the best art medium humans have ever invented, for it reunites everything we’ve done and known before: music, architecture, sculpture, painting, story telling, interaction. Not long from now, it is going to be the dominant medium. It’s already is: Angry Birds and Candy crush saga and other casual form of video games are already dominant.

PS. After a discussion with my friend, Joel, I’d like to amend: my point is not to create a “superior” virtual world. No, not at all. But reality has its awesomeness, while imagination and story telling has its awesomeness too. We got to invest in both, both in our daily experiences and in our imaginary experiences. One point, both join together to create this world of intertwining sensation/adventure/imaginary/sensorial continuum. That. Is absolutely awesome!