Intelligent stairs - can it be done?

Intelligent stairs - can it be done?

Yesterday I wrote about local intelligence and the possibilities doors have in this respect. Today, reading yesterday's note, my mind turned to stairs - another building element that fascinates me. Why do I expect intelligence from doors and not from stairs? Why do I assume that stairs are to remain passive or even unyielding? Is it just that I'm used to dynamic behaviour in doors? There are automatic stairs, too; escalators that detect that someone is approaching and start rolling. Why does this impress me less than a door automatically opening to admit authorised persons on a biometric basis? Could it be so that I see stairs as a danger, something to be feared and treated with caution - and for that reason prefer them to be passive? 

It could be because intelligence in stairs may be far more demanding than in doors. Automatically adjusting the stair dimensions to the size and mobility of every user would certainly impress me but it wouldn't be easy to achieve, even if it were about a single user at a time. Stairs that could accommodate several users simultaneously in this manner would be a feat worthy of the highest praise for its ingenuity but, as societal or technological priorities go, not of the same order as a cure for any persistent illness. So, I fear that stairs are to remain relatively unintelligent, passive and a bit menacing - beautiful but rather dangerous. 

What every door should know about itself

What every door should know about itself

Doors have a fascinating duality. Open they become space, part of the 'voids' of architecture: a hole that connects two spaces. Closed they are 'solids': building elements that separate the two spaces. Their interactionwieh humans can be complex, allowing first of all change between the two states of open and closed, as well as recognisable variation in between: ajar, half open, half closed - many recognisable states, often with specific maning.

This duality and interaction makes doors critical for the behaviour and performance of a building. It also makes them prime candidates for intelligent behaviour of the kind that delights me: local, practical, modest. Such intelligence can be observed both n real life, with automatically opening doors and similarly smart recognition of the user, and in design representations, with doors sticking to their walls or otherwise becoming attuned to their context.

What delights me above all is that such intelligence, certainly in a design representation, can be made possible by collecting all constraints on a door and using them to determine the behaviour of the door symbol. It's an interesting perspective: when the door knows enough about itself, it can become intelligent.

The perils of introversion

The perils of introversion

For some time now I've been coordinating and compiling a research proposal concerning some extension of traditional architectural activities - let's leave it as cryptic as that. The first hing that struck me was that there was no reason why this extension hadn't been realised yet; in many respects, it's just an additional service architects could offer, a simple extra application of stuff they do anyway.

The second thing was the number of unsolicited telephone calls and emails I received from people from other disciplines who insisted they should join the project. They were not exactly offering their capacities and asking whether we could use them, they were actually quite insistent they should be included, often on the basis of an earlier, fuzzy acquaintance or some unhappy past collaboration. Their key argument was that we needed them, that the project would not succeed without their contribution.

I tried to be polite and explain that it would be a primarily architectural project, implying that their own discipline was outside its scope, but soon realised that they felt strangely at home in the architectural domain. They saw proposing what architecture should do within their remit - not as clients or users of the built environment but as experts with some authority.

This prompted a question in mind but did not ask it: would they behave in the same manner towards someone with a proverbially high skill or high knowledge level, like a brain surgeon or a nuclear physicist? I doubt that. Architecture is one of those areas where almost everyone feels at home, usually for the wrong reasons and with wrong intentions. That everyone knows buildings as a user, that many can arrange furniture in a room, that some can build or even plaster a wall doesn't mean that they all know architecture, that they may dictate its scope and direction.

Regrettably, architects may be at least partially to blame for that. If other architects remain the main audience of architects if architects do not know more than the rest about the schools, hospitals, offices and other types of buildings they design, if they don't care to demonstrate their mastery of not just form and style but also use and utility, people may assume that there isn't much in this architecture lark and other scientists may believe that architecture has little knowledge of its own to offer on matters they may know themselves or just be interested in from their own perspective.

Old worlds

Old worlds

I was watching the European Athletics Indoors Championships when I heard the commentators on the BBC mention the Commonwealth record. That was a word I hadn't heard for years and was struck by its colonial and imperial connotations. I know of the Commonwealth Games and I'm sure that athletes competing in them take them seriously but the records are a different thing. They refer to a view of the world that seems quite outdated. Even the geographic subdivision in continents means little nowadays with the high mobility of athletes who may train in two or more different continents every year and can easily catch a flight to hop around the globe in order to compete in various games and meetings in rapid succession.

The same seems to apply to architects, as more and more are not bounded by countries and continents in their work. The great ones in particular often get the chance to descend like demigods from some airplane to enlighten and amaze the locals with their genius. Mobility among architects seems to have its own commonwealths, networks around established names, cities and countries of acknowledged prominence. Even in our networked world that claims to offer opportunities to all, the old worlds appear to retain much of their old cultural power.

Failing the physical

Failing the physical

A fellow architect and university professor was talking to me about a lecture she'd attended. It was by some big shot from the museum world, whom she had found extremely knowledgeable and intelligent but at the same time irritating. I listened to her account and counterarguments why the big shot had it wrong but soon I drifted off. All I was hearing was differences of opinion concerning symbolic interpretations, semantic aspects, digitisation and various meta-matters. I compared these to my own recent experiences at museums and realised that this particular architectural debate was far removed from the physical reality and human interaction with it. It felt as if architecture had abandoned the physical environment, as if it no longer posed a challenge, as if everything there had been solved and architects had to move on to higher things.

Unfortunately, that's not the case and quite probably will never be. The built environment is far from what it should be in terms of behaviour and performance. It costs too much and delivers comparatively little. In museums, engineers may have managed to solve lighting, humidity and other technical problems but interaction with the resulting environment is often disappointing. Visitors may still experience glare when viewing a painting, may even have trouble finding a decent point from where to view a painting (just try to do so in front of one of the major masterpieces in any museum), circulation can be irritating, orientation can be a problem etc. Architecture hasn't moved on from those issues, it has failed them.

How to recognise a building

How to recognise a building 

It happens all the time: while driving through some unknown part of the Netherlands, in the periphery of my vision, some building catches my attention and immediately I know it's a school, a civic building or something other than the housing that dominates the urban environment. I don't have to think about it, I just directly know it. Scale, proportions, fenestration and other features make it evident that the building belongs to a particular use type.

So I wonder how far this goes, whether most people can recognise buildings like than and where it comes from: from earlier experiences with different buildings or from fundamental differences in form. This is an intriguing subject, especially because quite a lot doesn't seem to come from direct personal experience: if you ask a Dutch child to draw a house, they'll most probably draw an outline they've learned from books, with the roof pitch visible from the side rather than the front, as in the usual Dutch row housing.

Open and closed

Open and closed 

Now that research is so much about grants, one gets confronted with conflicting ideas about research output. Open access and open data are deemed essential for the dissemination of knowledge - and rightly so: even with the vast expanses of the Internet, there's a lot of scientific knowledge that remains inaccessible to the people who should be able to use it, like students, especially at poorer universities that cannot afford all subscriptions to all journals. Naturally, if everything is open and digital, I wonder what's the use of publishers any longer. Editors, reviewers etc. are almost always academics who deliver services just to further their area or career. Any colleague who asked for something like that would have my cooperation and of course any colleague can set up a website for accommodating publications and datasets.

At the same time, we're asked to be careful about intellectual property (IP), both our own and that of others. We have to register background IP when we enter a collaborative venture, administer foreground IP produced in such a venture, note side ground IP produced alongside the venture, and monitor postground IP that is produced afterwards thanks to the venture. Neologisms aside, I accept that IP is important as an asset and we have to protect our institutes' rights, even if we're not talking about formal IP like patents. We have to earn money nowadays and safeguarding IP is a good way of guaranteeing that.

Obviously there's a conflict between opening the door for others to access our publications and data and closing it to protect the IP that's in these publications and data. If one reads a text of mine and learns how to do something as well as I do, what prohibits them from using this knowledge? Or should I obscure some critical details in order to have exclusive rights to the real IP? Sharing knowledge and learning from each other have been hallmarks of science and research, and I'm unwilling to change that.

Even worse is that these issues are sidetracking us from our core business to legalese and managementspeak topics that contribute nothing to the main reasons why one does research: learn and explain. I don't want to spend my days like that; I don't even want to pay managers and lawyers to protect me from that. I prefer a simpler, perhaps naive world where research is an integral part of an academic's work, regardless of grants and IP. And yes, any publication provides open access to knowledge. Free access to the publication is a different matter; as I expect students to pay tuition fees, even if only to treat the education they receive as a privilege, I expect that one pays at least a small sum to be able to read a scientific book or journal. It's not different to any other book or journal.