The Architecture of Information

Architecture, Interaction Design and the Patterning of Digital Information

Martyn Dade-Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136807947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book looks at relationships between the organization of physical objects in space and the organization of ideas. Historical, philosophical, psychological and architectural knowledge are united to develop an understanding of the relationship between information and its representation.

Despite its potential to break the mould, digital information has relied on metaphors from a pre-digital era. In particular, architectural ideas have pervaded discussions of digital information, from the urbanization of cyberspace in science fiction, through to the adoption of spatial visualizations in the design of graphical user interfaces.

This book tackles:

• 
  
  

• the historical importance of physical places to the organization and expression of knowledge
• the limitations of using the physical organization of objects as the basis for systems of categorization and taxonomy
• the emergence of digital technologies and the twentieth century new conceptual understandings of knowledge and its organization
• the concept of disconnecting storage of information objects from their presentation and retrieval
• ideas surrounding 'semantic space'
• the realities of the types of user interface which now dominate modern computing.

Chapter 1

The Architectonic System

Architecture organizes space surrounding man. It organizes this space as a whole and with respect to man in his entirety, that is with respect to all the physical or psychic actions of which man is capable …

(Mukařovský 1977: 240)

Part 1: Architecture and Meaning

When we observe architecture in the twenty-first century, it is obvious to suggest that buildings provide more than basic shelter. We know that the built environment of any modern human habitation is a cacophony of spatial compositions, ornaments, styles and typologies. We know that the rich complexity encoded in the built environment provides ample material for architectural critics, historians, theorists, anthropologists, sociologists and countless others. We know that buildings are among the most sophisticated objects that humans create. We know that buildings can express our political, moral and social ideals, but do we understand how? Is architecture a medium for information? Are buildings a language of communication?

Taken in their entirety, architectural ideas constitute an unimaginably large corpus of material, with varying degrees of relevance to this enquiry. A fully comprehensive approach would certainly overburden this relatively short book, but selectivity is challenging as, to borrow a term from the Russian literary theorist Jan Mukařovský, architecture exists on a number of ‘functional horizons’ (Mukařovský 1977: 241). It is not possible to look at a building as a functional object related directly to its current use without cross-referencing with the assumptions derived from historical typologies and norms, the social context in which design decisions were made and the designer’s own creative process (Mukařovský 1977: 241–2). If we attempt to unpick any one of these functional horizons by, for example, isolating a building’s practical function, then our understanding of the building may unravel. Such a holistic view of architecture is, however, problematic in relation to this enquiry, which simultaneously seeks a broader understanding of architecture beyond the built environment and a more focused understanding of space as a particular means of structuring communication.

This chapter will address this problem of architectural complexity by seeking a fundamental understanding of how the human mind shapes space and, conversely how the human mind is shaped by space at primitive, cognitive and conceptual levels. A range of sources will be used around common themes of pre-historic architecture, architectural languages, cognitive architecture and architectonic systems.

Pre-historic Architecture

The forms and structures we now conceive as being ‘architectural’ have evolved over time. That is to say that, using a crude but illustrative analogy with biological processes, more complex architectural organisms have emerged from earlier and simpler forms. A book on modern human anatomy could easily stretch to thousands of pages, but, trace the human ancestral line back far enough, and we arrive at the single-celled organism that represents our oldest relative and which may be described in equivalent detail on one page. Recorded architectural history is relatively recent and historical narratives tend to be limited to formal ‘civilized’ architectures which occur some distance up the architectural evolutionary tree.¹ Archaeologists, however, are often interested in the earliest forms of settlement and anthropologists have, in parallel, researched and written accounts of ‘primitive’ settlements and communities that have been isolated from the progression of formal civilizations. These accounts help build a picture of pre-historic architecture and the most basic motivations which drive us to articulate our spatial environment. Through these studies, a lens is created through which we can view the fundamental human need to pattern our environments.

Architectural Languages

From these foundational accounts of the built environment, the notion of a ‘language’ of architecture will emerge. To some extent, ‘language’ in this context is simply another analogy. Like biological organisms, languages change over time, becoming more complex and developing new ‘families’ derived from common ancestors. Languages also encode a sort of DNA, allowing commonly inherited features such as sounds, grammars and syntaxes to be traced from their governing structures. Applying the language analogy to architecture further implies that information content can be written in stone and read in the form of architectural space. This way of talking about architecture emerges from a structuralist tradition of philosophical thought and, while there is a tradition relating to various historical ‘languages of architecture’ through description of stylistic convention, the structuralist view of architecture attempts to uncover space as a communicative medium by understanding, not how particular forms of architecture relate to particular meanings, but rather, following the linguistic teaching of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913),² how a language or meanings is enabled by a particular structural system. What I hope to show is that architecture and language have developed from the same origin and remain intertwined but essentially distinct. Following the structuralist theme, I will draw on sources which read social structure as it is written in the form and configuration of the built environment.

Cognitive Architecture

As well as addressing the emergence of forms which humans have developed to shape and pattern their environment, this chapter will also develop an account of a cognitive architecture by looking at theories on how the brain structures knowledge by defining patterns of ideas, both consciously and subconsciously. These descriptions of knowledge representation, which are borrowed from cognitive psychology, reveal the bind between the cognitive propensity to spatialize knowledge and the imprints of that knowledge as articulated in the spatial world.

Architectonic Systems

Building on these first three themes, I then wish to develop a fourth, which isolates a particular type of ‘architectural’ thought and moves the discussion of architecture beyond the concrete material of the built environment and toward something much broader. This ‘something’ I will describe as ‘architectonics’, which exists because of what Kojin Karatani describes as the ‘will to architecture’ (Karatani 1995: 5). This ‘will to architecture’ defines a particular view of, not only how and why we articulate physical space through buildings, but also how we impose structure on our mental classifications of the world through recourse to architectural metaphor. By understanding the origin and affect of the ‘will to architecture’, the domain of architectonics is revealed as something which simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the world as it exists and as it is perceived.

Following this introduction, this chapter is split into four parts. Parts 2 and 3 tackle the concept of the architectonic system from two different angles. Part 2 starts with a notion of spatial organization shaping the human mind and discusses the relationship between early forms of architecture and so-called ‘primitive’ cultures and settlements and deals with the emergence of early types of classification. It will be argued in this section that the human propensity to structure our world into abstract classification systems is a result of the organization of society into distinct groups of individuals with specific roles and responsibilities. Such social groupings are then made manifest in the organization of social space; through the configuration of rooms in a dwelling or the organization of buildings in a whole village. Such patterns have been read extensively by structural anthropologists following the work on the evolution of ‘primitive classification’ by Claude Levi-Strauss (1963; 1995) and Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss (1963). By uncovering the deep connection between social space and the emergence of classification, this section will seek to move the discussion of architecture and meaning beyond the language of form and towards a separate concept of space and its organization. In turn, the built form as an articulation of space will be described as a means of structuring our mental as well as physical worlds.

Whereas Part 2 starts with physical space and its role in shaping mental spaces, Part 3 approaches architectonic systems from the opposite point of view. This section will investigate how knowledge is represented in the mind. The domain of knowledge representation has a long history and it is studied in philosophy and, more recently, in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and computer science. The study of knowledge representation has the aim of both helping our understanding of the human mind and enabling systems to be built that are capable of simulating aspects of the human mind through ‘artificial intelligence’. This section will build on earlier studies of knowledge representation by distinguishing a model based on the three levels of cognitive structure as they are currently understood: symbolic, conceptual and subconceptual representations. Focusing on ‘conceptual’ representations, it will be shown that, with reference to the work of Peter Gardenfors (2000), types of knowledge representations called ‘conceptual spaces’ exist and provide a bridge between the way our bodily senses receive information about the world and the patterning of knowledge in the mind. By elucidating the theory of conceptual spaces, it will be shown that the mind cannot be considered something which is entirely abstracted from our physical interactions with the world. Furthermore, drawing on the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Lakoff 1990, Johnson 1990, Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999) on the problem of knowledge representations, I will show how human understanding of abstract concepts is often constrained by the representations we use to describe them.

Part 4 will develop an historical example of the unification of spatial organization and knowledge representation by focusing on ‘the art of memory’, as described by Francis Yates (2001), and the ‘method of loci’, which involves the use of physical environments to help in the memorizing of abstract facts and concepts. The method of loci leads to the development of new types of art and architecture based on the human propensity to recollect journeys through physical spaces (both real and imagined). More than the creation of new art forms, the art of memory left us with a legacy of philosophical thought based on a relationship between topos (place) and topic (subject). This legacy can be traced through the development of the manifestation of conceptual spaces in typologies such as museums and libraries, which are designed to act as explicit knowledge representations. These building typologies not only act as storehouses for objects but organize those objects and our interaction with them. Museums and libraries are the most obvious types of ‘information architecture’ and provide sophisticated examples of conceptual spaces made real.

Part 5 will conclude by drawing together the threads of the discussion on architectonic systems and will provide the historical and philosophical basis for the enquiry in Chapter 2 into the evolution of digital technologies and the idea of separating information from its material means.

Part 2: Architectonic Systems and the Emergence of Categorization

Beyond Languages of Space

One problem with any discourse on architectural space and meaning is that architectural space is such a complex phenomena. Furthermore, the term ‘space’ is found in such a wide range of contexts that discussions of spatial meaning can lead to wildly divergent conclusions depending on what sort of space is being described. Indeed, wading through the literature on philosophies of space it is often unclear which thinkers base their observations on real physical spaces and which thinkers understand space simply as a useful metaphor to describe social processes or more abstract ideas.³

In the introduction, I hinted at the possibility of a semantic and a grammar of architecture. The notion of architectural language has been prevalent in many texts on architectural theory and history⁴ and many relate directly to structuralist theories of language and linguistics.⁵ Nevertheless, the language analogy is a problematic one, particularly when an attempt is made to imbue the built environment with a level of articulateness akin to oral language. Searches for a ‘language of architecture’, therefore, tend to be confined to analyses of specific styles of architectural form where there is a formal and systematic relationship between architectural formalisms and intended meanings. The use of the language analogy in architectural analysis also has the potential to become anachronistic. The problem is that most ‘meanings’ in art, architecture or indeed written and oral languages are culturally specific, so that the language must be known before meaning can be inferred (whether spatial, visual or symbolic). In other words, meanings can only be read effectively in a specific time and place by someone initiated into the language. Linguistic meanings tend to change or get ‘lost in translation’ and, as a result, linking a specific language model with architecture becomes difficult and is likely to become irrelevant as cultural interpretations change over time.

By isolating the idea of Space Syntax in the introduction, I have deliberately attempted to define architecture as a structural phenomena, and extending this notion I will now attempt to provide a counterpart to the language analogy by separating two distinct systems, which I will describe as the linguistic system and the architectonic system. To do this I will start with a discussion of the earliest types of architecture and of how the patterning of the environment may have lead to the first patterns of categorization and social organization.

The Emergence of the Architectonic System

What was the first architectural gesture? It seems tempting to identify the origin of architecture with a need for human shelter and to understand early buildings as temporary enclosures, one evolutionary step away from cave dwelling. We have little or no archaeological evidence for the very first dwellings and it is likely that those where remains exist are comparatively advanced examples. It is possible that, well before the development of the relatively complex technologies necessary to build architectural structures capable of providing shelter, human beings began to pattern their environment by creating structures and imprints that were capable of defining spaces.⁶ It is also true that humankind has always existed in the cradle of a natural architecture, created by the structural forms of the landscape (Kostof 1995: 21). The earliest practice of architecture may, therefore, have been to invest natural structures found in an environment with symbolic meaning associated with ritual or simply to delineate territory.⁷

With the de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration credits
• Introduction
• 1. The architectonic system
• 2. Between city lights receding and the non-space of the mind
• 3. The spaces of information
• 4. Reality becomes display
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index