Facebook, Ipad and Architecture

(Cover of the book Urban Interventions: Personal Projects in Public Spaces)

Things of the decade, Facebook, Ipad and Twitter, but how do they affect architecture?

Before I answer the question, allow me to explain the complex context of the social revolution.
For one, this moment in time has been to my knowledge aptly named as the social revolution. This 'revolution' seems to be marked by the explosion of ideologies and the speed of sharing ideas.This dynamism it isn't exactly fed by the speed of communication, but the increased accessibility of complex ideas. To explain this increased accessibility of ideas, take for example that I have found that roadtrips are an excellent way to spend the weekend, but my clique of friends do not share the same interest. However, a quick search of Facebook may allow me to be introduced to new people, friends of friends or even my own friends that share the same interest, all this in a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. This accessibility of ideas would have been otherwise less accessible due to the invisible geological and cultural divides of our very own clique of friends.

We see this concept of idea sharing with the introduction of the phrases like 'apps'. Apps, or applications, are a good example of the characteristics of the social revolution. Unlike previous decades with software almost solely developed by large corporations,  many Iphone and Ipad apps are made by individuals and are often offered to users for free. This leads us to a discussion on the increasing popularity of open-source objects. While open-source has been around for a while, it has only recently generated a lot of hype. Before the advent of Facebook and Iphone apps, many people did not believe that there could be an industry from open-source. Although the internet was out since the 1990's the majority of people were still stuck with the idea of protecting ideas through patents. This is entirely troublesome and most likely a waste of time with the advent of high quality China copycats.

Might as well offer up designs, ideas and concepts as open source and allow people to tweak and improve the design, accumulating as many people's ideas towards the initial design along the way, very quickly maturing the design from just a conceptual idea to a workable product.

So what effects does these 'evolutionary' ideas have on architecture?

(LEGO Towers Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) ) 

Well it is still too soon to pin point the effects apart but we have seen that the rising stars of architecture like BIG and MVRDV are more focused towards the social interactions that occur in a building than before. We see this happening too in the art world with more and more introductions of interactive art. Gone are the days of ordinary building typologies, the Facebook era architecture should empower the individual experiences of the architecture, both within an from afar. Lines should be blurred, iconic buildings should not be iconic from shear height, mass or size. Instead architecture should mimic the individual support for different causes on Facebook or different Iphone apps suiting different personalties. Architecture of today should reflect the current evolution of human thought, icons through individuality. Iconic buildings should come from the individuality and brilliance of design concept, new ideas that allow the flexibility and freedom of human interpretive interaction.


We have seen this before through the interpretion of public spaces in the 1990's by skateboarders. How did they experience architecture? How did they interpret it? Just a flight of stairs, a shortcut, or a place for them to hang out and have fun? Essentially, the flight of stairs became a catalyst of an idea, drawing people of similar interests and shaping the world with it.

We must emulate this, user or architect, every person, its role.