Performative Environments: Architecture Acting with Flows

• Published in: Architectural theory review Vol. 13; no. 3; pp. 320 - 336
• Main Author: Thomsen, Bo Stjerne
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 01.12.2008
• ISSN: 1326-4826; 1755-0475
• DOI: 10.1080/13264820802488283

The paper explores how performative architecture can act as a collective environment localizing urban flows and establishing public domains through the integration of pervasive computing and animation techniques. The NoRA project introduces the concept of 'performative environments,' focusing on the means by which architecture can enact places through socio-technical relationships. The architecture stands out as dynamic and open and carries emergent affects that facilitate interaction in a new configuration between objects and subjects. By crossing social and technological networks between flows of local interactions and network behaviour, building becomes social infrastructure and prompts an understanding of architectural structures as quasiobjects, which can retain both variation and recognisability in changing social constellations. Architecture becomes the result of competing forces. It is a programmatic architecture that registers the impulses of human habitation, and adapts to those impulses. 1 Thinking of place as performed and practiced can help us think of place in radically open and non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over and reimagined in practical ways. Place is the raw material for the creative production of identity rather than an a priori label of identity. 2 Recently we have witnessed a paradigm shift from cyberspace to pervasive computing. Instead of pulling us through the looking glass into some sterile, luminous world, digital technology now pours out beyond the screen, into our messy places, under our laws of physics; it is built into our rooms, embedded in our props and devices-everywhere. 3