The key here is _whose_ creativity is being enabled by this. Modernist use of modularity generally wasn’t concerned with enabling the creativity of the inhabitants of buildings and so was indeed folly. But post-modernists still didn’t offer anything better in that they were still not enabling creativity outside their professional community based on the very same presumption that experts always know best.
Eric Hunting explains an interesting thesis: it is the space “where” modularity can occur, that allows creativity to occur because it lowers the treshold of hacking/innovating. So depending on where the modularity in the system is located, will determine “whose” creativity becomes possible. This reasoning is applied to architecture in the following contribution that first appeared in an email exchange.
Eric Hunting:
“I think of modularization and standardization as a way of creating new vernaculars, which were not merely regional styles but a way of encoding as a cultural tradition a collection of knowledge of things that were known to work so that, as shelter become more sophisticated in technology with time, the ease and speed of building a home could be increased by eliminating experimentation. In engineering, modularity functions as a way of encoding and compartmentalizing knowledge into the topology and architecture of components so that someone farther down the chain of development doesn’t need to know all that knowledge to use it. This is how we get to the point today where a child can successfully assemble a computer with ease.
Modernist architects in the past employed modularity for a number of reasons. Some sought to adapt construction to accommodate industrial mass production so as to apply its benefits to the reduction of the cost of housing, making it as close to universally affordable as possible and improving the base standard of living for all. Some sought to ‘automate’ design and engineering through the reduction of the functional elements of a home to spatially interchangeable units of standardized -pre-tested or proven- individual design -the closest they got to the idea of a vernacular. And, of course, some just employed it as as style. A way of being deliberately different and unusual for its own sake.
Later designers abandoned modularity in architecture because they considered it a folly stifling creativity for the sake of mass-production industrialization. (which, of course, never did pan out because designers of the era wouldn’t employ modularity at a level and scale low enough to where it might threaten the loss of their own professional control over design -like in the early computer era when everyone thought ‘standards’ were such a great idea that every company wanted to ‘own’ one while still exploiting deliberate non-interoperability as a means to control market shares) And yet the example of the PC shows that, instead of stifling creativity, the compartmentalization of knowledge through modularity enables creativity by lowering the bar of engineering knowledge needed to perform different kinds of ‘hacking’. And so while the PC has become very ‘standardized’ in underlying architecture, it has diversified endlessly in physical form. You see today this wild and strange diversity of PCs manufactured and home-made that range from simple mass-produced pocket devices, laptops, tablets, and monitors to the most outrageous objet d’art such as picture frames, Chinese urns, steampunk contraptions, stuffed animals (http://www.instructables.com/id/Compubeaver—%3e-How-to-case-mod-a-beaver—in-29-e/), elegant hand-crafted wooden artifacts akin to classic radios, pieces of furniture, recyclable cardboard boxes, hardcover books, and statues of cartoon characters and anime pin-ups. As silly as some of these things are (personally, I’d be happy if they were all black boxes and seamless ceramic tablets -http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/File:Geode.jpg), it’s in this process that ‘standards’ evolve, hacks turning de rigueur to become the basis of later standards, the iterative design of the technology collecting and concentrating knowledge through its use -and mis-use.
The key here is _whose_ creativity is being enabled by this. Modernist use of modularity generally wasn’t concerned with enabling the creativity of the inhabitants of buildings and so was indeed folly. But post-modernists still didn’t offer anything better in that they were still not enabling creativity outside their professional community based on the very same presumption that experts always know best. Most of the architecture in the world isn’t designed by architects -just as most of the clothes in the world isn’t haute couture. Thinking about where building technology has the most impact in terms of social empowerment is what matters here. I’m not suggesting the obsolesce of architectural design by new building technology. I’m suggesting something far more fundamental to the way we house ourselves and the basic access to housing -obsolescence of bankers…
When we deliberately devise any sort of modular standard it should be with the anticipation of losing control of it to its users and of its evolving in ways we can’t always expect -and we should consider that the sign of its success, a proof of it being alive. Given the way our culture is so rapidly evolving today, I think the contemporary architect should consider his role as something more akin to the genetic engineer than the simple designer producing a discrete ‘perfect’ artifact. We are in an age where the notion that the function and role of anything stays the same over time is an anachronism. We should think of ‘ways of habitation’ occupants ‘engage in’ and the ‘platforms’ they use instead of discrete buildings as products or some kind of public sculpture. In the future the physical structure may not matter much. It may all be as ephemeral as the architecture in Second Life -it’s persistence based not on how durable it is -skyscrapers built to last centuries are torn down daily- but rather on the persistence of its social function in a particular place and time. Like eddies in the flow.
(I recently returned to use of Second Life after regaining a more civilized Internet connection and -as an example of the kind of nut I am…- the first thing I did was look for a virtual shipping container to pull out of my pocket as a portable house. SL’s virtual environment is a kind of VR oxymoron that exposes the limitations of contemporary notions of space and property. Linden Labs’ business model is based on trying to create an analog of the real-world real-estate market to exploit for profit in an environment whose role is simply socialization and where, logically, no one should actually need static personal property. The use of it has actually becomes detrimental -resulting in an aesthetic Crisis of the Commons! It’s gotten to the point where sophisticated users with some design and programming skill actually developed their own virtual-virtual reality platform -called Horizons- to create on-demand private environments isolated from the main virtual environment without the cost of real estate. Nomadic virtual environment inside another virtual environment!)”