It's not for you! It's for the building

Mother Nature has given way to Mother Technology. In our homes, offices and public spaces, technology has become a way of life and it has certainly changed the way we interact with architecture. The growing complexity of mechanical and digital systems presents us with new circumstances to adapt to. How do we live together with the ever-present machine?

The switch to technologically saturated buildings has brought about not only new comforts, but also resistance and suspicion. The machine is no longer a convenient aid — it is now an integral part of architecture. Tangles of devices seem to encroach on diminishing living spaces. Smart solutions produce dumb results. At times, the machine imposes its own rules, alienating people from the spaces designed for them. Some people might view this as dystopian, believing technology has gone too far. But as with most arguments claiming that something has gone too far, the real issue is fear of the unfamiliar.

Our relationship with technology is ambivalent, contradictory, and often fraught with hypocrisy. From within our carefully conditioned fossil-fuelled interiors it is easy to forget that, after all, machines are our own creations, made for our own good. While architecture is struggling to find its relevance on the brink of ecological collapse, technology is not to blame. Quite the contrary – the machines, like the problems they solve, are most often a product of architecture itself.

The installation for the International Architecture Biennale in Venice embodies our contradictory attitude towards technology in a tangible and interactive way. At first sight, the tangle of black pipes looks like a foreign object that has overrun a human environment like a parasite. However, the installation urges passers-by to change their attitude and recognise a friendly neighbour in this seemingly frightening stranger, who responds to our presence and even addresses us in its own incomprehensible but reassuring language. This experience of coexistence between humans and man-made machines inspires us to create a sustainable partnership, simultaneously calling us to reassess the growing role of technology in contemporary architecture.

And if the current global health crisis has taught us anything, it is that when Mother Nature turns its back on us, technology turns from foe to friend. Cities are more than just clusters of buildings, and machines can bridge the connections interrupted by the “new normal”. Technology is a means to an end. What may have seemed only “for the building”, proves to be “for you” after all.

Connection Interrupted

In 2020, in response to the global health crisis, Latvia’s Venice
Biennale pavilion was exhibited in a transformed form in Riga, Latvia. The installation “Connections Interrupted” is a play on the distance between individuals, households, cities and states that the pandemic has brought about. Having to work remotely and observe social distancing, people are forced to isolate themselves in their homes, where they maintain their connections with the rest of the world via technology. Physical ties have been replaced with digital signals. Severing the old connections has made our homes an unprecedented cluster of functions — our homes are now not only our private recreation areas, but also offices, schools, kindergartens, gyms, bars, restaurants and concert halls. Separated from the rest of the city, the living space has undergone social, functional and emotional saturation and is now cluttered. Although due to the pandemic our homes have become isolated from each other, like lonely islands, digital solutions have simultaneously made them transparent, by merging the boundaries between private and public space.

At the same time, the pandemic has served as a reminder of the
well-known truth that cities are not just a collection of individual buildings,
but of interconnections, and these have now been severed as a result of the
spread of the “Covid-19” virus. By the same token, nations are more than just clusters of cities, and the planet as a whole is more than a group of independent states. The global health crisis has forced us to find new ways to maintain this interconnected network, at least for the time being. Our streets have now become wires and our airports have become server complexes. By reversing our original concept for the installation, we want to illustrate the new role of technology during the pandemic, as it no longer focuses on a person living at home, but on the world outside.

The tangle of wires at the core of the installation embodies social, functional, emotional and technological oversaturation. The withdrawal, distancing and introversion that characterise the pandemic are symbolised by the fragile frame surrounding the archetypal form of the house. Equipped with motion sensors, the ball of wires responds to visitors and passers-by, sending light signals in their direction.