This post is the article form of a presentation urbanARCHnow was invited to give at ArchiFest Conversations 2015, a series of informal short presentations by speakers from various backgrounds, followed by a discussion session. The event was held on 9 October 2015 at the Singapore Institute of Architects headquarters at 79 & 81 Neil Road. ArchiFest is Singapore’s annual festival to celebrate architecture & the built environment.
My name is Jonathan Choe and I am going to speak a bit about digital networks and the future of architecture. I am an architectural designer at a leading design firm in Singapore. But I am going to talk today as an archi-blogger. My website Urban Architecture Now (this site!) features articles on contemporary architecture & urbanism with a focus on the regional (Asian) architectural scene. I have also written about architecture for websites like CNN travel online and ArchDaily among other publications, and am very active on social media.
I started Urban Architecture Now in 2011 as a means for me to share my projects, thoughts & ideas while studying architecture in Chicago and Paris, interning in Singapore, and travelling the world. It has since grown into one of Singapore’s most popular architecture websites, with between 20-100k monthly pageviews.
When I was asked to speak about the future of architecture in Singapore (in line with ArchiFest 2015’s theme of ‘What Future?’), I decided not to speculate about utopian sustainable futures but instead to reframe a series of existing trends and emerging paradigms in digital networking within an architectural context, drawing from my experiences as an architect intensely engaged with social networks and online experiences.
I’m not going to talk about anything groundbreaking, but about existing frameworks and how they can revolutionise the ways that architects communicate & collaborate, and the ways digital means can enhance the general public’s experience of the built environment.
CHANGING THE WAY ARCHITECTS COMMUNICATE
What I think in recent years has completely changed the way that architects communicate is the proliferation of digital networks. In the past, architects only had a few ways to communicate their ideas, such as speaking, writing, and building. At most, with considerable effort, they could communicate with a few hundred people in a day when giving a talk and perhaps a few thousand by the end of the month through books, magazines, and people experiencing their built work.
In 2015, as a relatively unknown young designer, between various social networks and my website, any idea that I post will reach at least 13,000 people within a day, and by the end of the month will have over 25,000 direct views, not including viral views.
One of my most popular posts, 50 Stunning Houses in Singapore, went viral and almost a quarter of a million people visited the article in the span of a few weeks. And while this was really exciting, the most amazing part was the connections that I made, and and opportunities that arose such as being able to give this talk at ArchiFest or have an article featured on ArchDaily, which is all due to the power of digital networks.
This introduces a new paradigm for architectural communication, whereby ideas can be quickly disseminated to people around the world. In a really simple example, I was choosing between a few paint swatches and I posted this photo on Instagram (pictured above). Within a day, I got a bunch of feedback from people all over the world. It’s a really small thing but the opportunities can be powerful and happen all the time. Another example is on my recent trip to Melbourne where just by posting that I was coming to visit, I got a lot of really great advice from locals and was able to see really interesting places I wouldn’t have known about or been able to get into without these connections.
Social media is an interesting topic in terms of emerging forms of online architectural networks. Many architects seem to be very slow to pick up this new paradigm, sticking instead to traditional ways to disseminate their ideas such as monograph books, talks and articles. There are a few exceptions such as Bjarke Ingels who has turned himself into almost household name (a rarity among living architects, especially such a young one) through social media- he has almost 90k followers on Instagram. Locally in Singapore, WOHA Architects is spreading their ideas for a sustainable future to over 20,000 followers between Facebook and Instagram.
On the other hand, if you search for legendary starchitect Frank Gehry, you might see something like the above. He didn’t have a website for a long time, and now only has a simple page redirecting PR enquiries and posting job opportunities. Locally in Singapore, W Architects (the guys who redesigned the National Museum and Victoria Concert Hall, and did the fantastic new Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum) don’t have a website at all. If you search them online, you might find some of the articles I’ve written about their buildings, but no website. So I spoke to the director of W Architects, Mok Wei Wei, who said that he finds no compelling reason for his office to have a website, and that interested parties would find a way to get in contact with or without a website.
And this opinion is not without validity. I’ve talked to many architects, (most of which do have websites), but very few have actually won a job through social media or their websites. I’ve had a few job offers come through the internet, but the most interesting one was an African man who wanted me to build a resort for him in Nigeria (I’m not sure if he was a prince, but still… true story) However many qualitative benefits online promotion has in terms of PR & name recognition, in professional terms, it is hard to quantify the benefits of harnessing online media.
I have found that developers & owners, rather than architects, are often leading the pack in terms of harnessing social media to their advantage. One key example is ‘Instameets’, most prominently, when Facebook opened their new California headquarters (designed by Frank Gehry). Rather than publicising it through conventional media, Facebook (which owns Instagram) invited some of the most popular Instagrammers to tour and photograph the building, which generated an incredible amount of viral publicity for the new campus.
CapitaLand, a Singaporean developer (one of the largest in Asia) is very active on social media, and I have developed an interesting relationship with them. They are publicising their new buildings such as Moshe Safdie’s Sky Habitat and Toyo Ito’s CapitaGreen by inviting local Instagrammers, such as the YY twins (who presented at ArchiFest Conversations last week) and myself among others to explore their buildings and post about them online.
They even invited urbanARCHnow alongside traditional media outlets such as The Straits Times, Channel News Asia and CNBC to tour Sky Habitat with Moshe Safdie, intelligently using an archi-blogger’s viewpoint and audience to highlight the quality design that they focus on when developing their buildings, in a way that traditional media might overlook in favour of more mass-market interests.
Before this talk, I spoke to Tan Bee Leng, the head of group communications at CapitaLand and asked her why they are so proactive in social media about what benefits they receive. She said that in addition to the publicity, social media is an effective way for a massive organisation like CapitaLand to relate with people personally: whether tenants, shoppers, or just people who pass by their buildings every day, and interact with them on a personal basis. There are a lot of other benefits such as real-time feedback on their properties, what they are doing right and wrong, and even real time feedback on maintenance issues or cool things going on in their developments. This experience and strategy is very relevant to architects.
(Read below at the bottom of this post for the full exclusive interview with Tan Bee Leng, head of group communications at CapitaLand)
Digital networks are also changing the way architects work and collaborate. I came across an interesting case study recently while talking to an architect who operates a small local practice. They have been experimenting with using crowdsourcing sites such as Freelancer (which are typically known for getting things like logos and websites designed) to complete larger projects without increasing the size of their permanent staff. When a larger job comes along, you can package certain tasks such as rendering, drafting, or even basic design tasks into isolated elements which can then be put onto a crowdsourcing website to execute the task.
The way that this works is that people around the world will bid for the job, saying how much the task will cost, how long it will take them to complete the job, and providing the potential employer with their portfolio via their profile. The employer will then choose the bidder that they prefer, and pay the employee on a freelance basis once the job is complete. The two parties will likely never meet. This allows architectural practices in today’s economic climate to be very scaleable, flexible, and adaptive.
Intellectual property issues aside, it’s a great way that students, unemployed workers, or anyone from around the world could use a spare hour, day, or week to do a micro-internship and gain valuable experience regardless of national borders and the local economic conditions. And its also an interesting solution for Singapore’s current labour climate, as an innovative way to reduce the reliance on resident foreign talent.
There are a lot of other interesting tools out there such as Arcbazar, where clients can place jobs as simple as a kitchen remodel or as complex as an entire building up for worldwide competition. This site has gotten a lot of bad press from architects complaining that these websites drive down their fees, but its definitely an interesting concept.
Crowdsourcing is a big buzzword these days, and the use of websites like Kickstarter to crowdfund products has moved past fad and into a legitimate way to secure funding for innovative designs. So why can’t this be used for buildings? Well it has. You probably know about a few famous examples such as the + pool, a floating swimming pool in New York City where each tile is purchased by an individual and the funds will be used to build the structure.
Another very interesting example is the Luchtsingel bridge in the Netherlands, where a major pedestrian connection was missing from the city, and government bureaucracy was going to take decades to fill in the gap, crowdsourcing was used to complete the project in a few years. Each timber plank (pictured above) has the name of an individual donor on it.
This also provides an interesting opportunity which I would love to see this utilised in Singapore. Aside from being an innovative way to secure funding and to revitalise public spaces, it also gives everyday people a stake, a sense of ownership, and personal pride in their city- even if they don’t have enough money to build a library and name it after themselves.
WHEN DIGITAL & PHYSICAL WORLDS COLLIDE
So what does digital world look like as a physical object? When I was in university, I was very interested in the potential of QR codes, which are quite literally physical manifestations of digital networks. On the right is a speculative project I did for a memorial taking the form of a QR code, where the simple structure itself acts as a link to an online version of the memorial.
On the left is my old apartment at Marina City, a famous building in Chicago. I put a giant, one square metre QR code on my balcony railing, and tracked the number of people using it. No one went to the page. Nowadays QR codes are ubiquitous, but uncommonly used. However as technology improves and becomes more omnipresent, I hope to see new ways to link digital and physical realms.
These are some tables that I made with leftover glass samples, wooden dowels from Daiso, and 3D printed connection joints. 3D printing is one way that a digital object can become a physical one, and it means that you are able to quickly produce highly customised parts that you could never find in a store. In this case, the components fit their purpose so well that the design intent can be executed without the use of any nails or glue. And if you’re not a designer, millions of 3D printable objects are available online.
I have recently been exploring the use of virtual & augmented realities in architecture. Although these are also big buzzwords, any architect who hasn’t tried it out really should. I’ve been experimenting with a workflow from Revit into virtual reality using Unity (a video game development software which is free for architects to use) to export a 3D model onto Google Cardboard, a cheap VR headset that utilises your mobile phone screen and motion tracking sensors to create a 3D environment where you can turn your head and look around within a virtual space.
I was a bit skeptical when I began experimenting with VR, which I only did because one of my clients was asking about it, but I was amazed and instantly sold when I entered the courtyard of the building I have been designing for quite a while, and immediately for the first time got a sense of space, height, and distance which is just impossible through the abstraction of 2D drawings or even when looking at a 3D model on a computer screen.
Augmented reality takes this one step further by adding a layer of digital information to the real world through gadgets like Google Glass (pictured on the right) and in the future, maybe through contact lenses. AR has a great potential to influence the way we inhabit and experience cities. The video above shows a 2D CAD plan I saw the other day where when you look at it through an iPad camera, you can see the plan pop up in 3D and look around into the rooms and spaces. I saw one mobile application a while back where you hold your phone in front of your face and a series of coloured digital lines appear on the ground, and you can follow the red line to the nearest red line mass transit station.
However, the big challenge is going to be moving past Whatsapp notifications popping up at the corner of your eye and other gimmicks into digitally augmented cities and experiences. I think that architects, who are trained in creating spacial environments, are uniquely posed to curate the intersection of digital and physical worlds, and we should take responsibility for this inevitability.
I highly doubt that we will ever see a QR building like the one above on the Singapore skyline, but with Singapore as a technological hub, with high internet and smartphone penetration, and the government putting in place ambitious infrastructure to become one of the world’s first smart cities, Singaporean architects have the unique potential to become ‘smarchitects’, negotiating the integration between digital and physical. Architects have a unique skillset required to act as a mediator between digital and physical worlds- with one foot in technology and another grounded in spatial creation.
I’ll end off with this QR code, which I drew by hand, and is literally an analogue creation that communicates with digital devices, and if you scan this with your phone you’ll be taken to my website (you’re already there!). Thats what I think the future will be- not one where digital worlds take over, but where they become integrated into our built environment, and architects have a huge potential to play a big part in this future.
Join the conversation in the comments below- what do you think about digital networks and the future of architecture?
