makeshift

This is an entry to the recent 2G architectural ideas competition - Focusing on Venice, a city which (by necessity) presents the perfect testing ground for a conception of architecture closer to the sense in which computer programmers use the word. A social intelligence topology - the application of a scale of technology that so far architects have rarely engaged with. Using calculated interventions to infrastructure, mobility and construction processes, it's about making visible regional conditions which otherwise remain hidden.

 

01.The survival of the Venice lagoon as a habitable environment depends on conditions which are, at present, invisible to its inhabitants.

02.The data from huge numbers of scientific research projects studying these conditions in the Lagoon are, on the whole, disconnected and part only of a private, ‘expert’ experience of the city.

03.The city might gauge its chances of survival by how-well informed its citizens are: democracy is no longer an act of choosing but an act of doing.

04.Being a city whose permanent population is vastly outnumbered by its transient population, Venice must be the first city to question the traditional definitions of Citizenship.

05.An application of technology is proposed whose stated intent is the support of remote and local participation IN ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP (i.e.-informed amateur knowledge of the environment in which you find yourself)

06. Architects have so far left the application of networking technology to computer scientists, who have done so, mostly, on an individual, domestic or global scale. The local has been largely ignored. Having constructed a ‘global mind’, programmers contrived to create a place within it: A WEBSITE. Can we do the opposite: Apply integrated intelligence tools to a physical location; A SITEWEB?

07.Prediction: In the 21st century, architecture will be not so much concerned with making adjustments to the FORM of the city but to its OPERATING SYSTEM.

08.The Jewish Synagogue in the city is already being constantly monitored, for the slightest structural movement, from an office in Germany, having been fitted with fibre-optic cables.

09.Venice, being constrained by the huge economic value of its preserved artefactual beauty, paradoxically finds itself an unlikely pioneer of information-age urbanism. Industrial age architecture is of little use to it.

10.Set-out at intervals of 500m, the buoys operate as a frame for environmental measuring devices (simply clipped-on and plugged in). LED display bars exhibit data/statistics at specific times of night (as timetabled) Water ballast allows for future weight addition.

11.On each buoy, Local-access and remote-access hard drives are entirely separate to prevent ‘hacking’.

12.EMERGENCY USE: THE HIGH RISK-OF / SENSITIVTY-TO A SHIPPING ACCIDENT IN THE LAGOON; RESULTING IN AN OIL-SPILL. AS AN IMMEDIATE RESPONSE, INFLATABLE DRACONES CAN BE CLIPPED TO THE BUOYS, THUS CONTAINING THE OIL WITHIN A SPECIFIC REGION.

13.AT key times a specific DATA FEED is briefly exhibited as a colour light bar; lasting only 2 minutes (approximately the same interval as a total solar eclipse), the effect is to briefly reveal conditions which are otherwise invisible.

14.Secret histories can be stored and retrieved only locally via Bluetooth and short range FM broadcasts. (An open-content audio-guide to the Lagoon Park.)

15.IF IT SHOULD TURN OUT THAT VENICE CANNOT BE SAVED - WHAT WOULD BE LEFT BEHIND IS THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE ECHO IN MANKIND’S HISTORY; A FLOATING anthology OF STORIES AND RECORDS - AN EXHAUSTIVE POOL OF DATA as a resource for future generations.