softspace / hardspace

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Traditionally, architecture has been thought of as hardware: the static walls, roofs and floors that enclose us. An alternative approach is to think of architecture as software: the dynamic and ephemeral sounds, smells, temperatures even radio waves that surround us. One might also consider the social infrastructures that underpin our designed spaces. Pushing this analogy even further, we can think of architecture as a whole as an operating system, within which people create their own programmes for spatial interaction.
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everyone is a space designer and we all use our spaces and interfaces differently. We place posters on walls, paint the light blue or orange, position furniture in rooms, make love in kitchens, use ‘bedrooms’ as ‘offices’, sing opera in the shower, spray particular fragrances in our bathrooms and use staircases for arguments, games and romances. Meanwhile, we are increasingly likely to undertake the construction or improvement of our own homes without needing the services of an architect. Yet, most people do not think of themselves as being able to ‘design’.
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if an architect designs interaction systems then the production of architecture – which exists only at the moment of use – is placed in the hands of the end user. Architectural design, the choreography of sensations, can provide metaprograms within which people construct their own programs. In computers, an operating system is the software – like Unix, Windows or Mac OS – that runs a computer at its core level and which provides a platform upon which to run other programs. Extending the analogy to architecture, a spatial operating system provides frameworks to encourage multitudes of architectural programs. In this conception, people are the designers of their own spaces – architects simple design the meta-systems.
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the role of architect undergoes considerable change because people themselves interpret, appropriate, design and reuse a space within their own flames of logic. A truly open source architecture does not exist without people to inhabit, occupy, perceive, interact or converse with it. The resulting spaces don’t merely enable people to develop their own ways of responding, they are actually enriched by them doing so. As people become architects of their own spaces – through their use – or developers of their own interfaces, the words architecture and interface cease to be nouns: instead they become verbs. Such an architecture is explicitly dynamic, a shift that opens up a wealth of poetic possibilities for designer of open source space.

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Archfarm . Non-periodical fascicles on architecture . issue no7