more thesisizing

Emergent Behaviors/Emergent Typologies:
Student housing and Social Networking

What if we simply declare that there is no crisis – redefine our relationship
with the city not as its makers but as its mere subjects, as its supporters?

                                                                                                    - Rem Koolhaas

In his essay, ‘Whatever Happened to Urbanism?’ Rem Koolhaas provides a bleak assessment of the current practices of architecture and urbanism. While he offers criticism while offering no solution of his own, he recognizes the scale and complexity of the problem(s) of urbanism and architecture’s role in it. Koolhaas suggests that architects can no longer simply imagine grand new utopian scenarios of urbanity and society; knocking architects/designers/planners off the throne as kings of urbanism, a throne long devoid of any power and respect. If we were to take on the suggestion of Koolhaas, that architects are mere subjects, supporters; our role becomes that of facilitator, an agent of change, not THE agent.

Then the role of the architects becomes one of not imagining the future, but supporting it by analyzing and catalyzing emergent trends in culture, society and its social behaviors.  One may argue that in this digital society, trends come and go faster than ever before and to create architecture that responds to these ephemeral trends only serves to create architecture that is quickly outdated. However, that viewpoint lends architecture to either have no role or an infrastructural role, one in which architecture is flexible enough to accommodate future unforeseen trends to a point that architecture simply becomes a big box.  I believe that in capturing emergent trends, architecture plays a crucial role in maintaining the relevance of architecture as agents of urbanity and subsequently supporters of society and its behaviors. While people may argue that we are in danger of creating outdated buildings, it is still the role of an architect to meaningfully contribute to the built environment in a manner that is socially contextual.

In a time when the world and the United States is undergoing rapid urbanization, we cannot rely any longer on preceding models of urbanity, as these established urban contexts are undergoing radical change themselves, being both subtly and radically modified by new social behaviors.  Conventional models of urbanity and social interaction cannot be applied to developing areas such as American suburbia. These areas of low density unsustainable living face the same issue of their urban neighbors, as new social behaviors are no longer dependent on the built environment but are quickly emerging from the digital virtual world where social interactions take place and manifest themselves in the physical environment in unprecedented ways. Architecture has largely regarded the subject of social housing as dead and done, incapable of producing anything innovative and fresh. However, the emergence of online social networking, its new methods of virtual interaction and their subsequent manifestations in the physical world provide architects with a new bee’s hive of problems from which to extract new solutions and models, the architectural honey.

The biggest issue regarding the emergence and proliferation of social networks is the destabilization and disregard of conventional norms concerning privacy and its ready acceptance by the public. Nowhere is this more evident and dramatic than within the context of the college institution. Academic institutions, with the student housing environment in particular, have always been fertile grounds for social experiments, by both deliberate and accidental means. It is because of this environment and mindset that the digital and social evolutions of society have taken place in this context, the young college student is an avid acolyte for new and fresh emergent trends.

This thesis seeks to establish a new model of student housing, proposing a model of spatial organization and subsequent user interaction through the application of digital and physical patterns of social networking as a conceptual framework, to promote the role of architecture as a vehicle and catalyst for new modes of urbanity.

The architect who builds a house or designs a site plan, who decides where the roads will and will not go, and who decides which directions the houses will face and how close together they will be, also is, to a large extent, deciding the pattern of social life among the people who will live in these houses.

                               - Maurice Brody, People and Buildings: Social Theory in
                                  Architectural Design

Brody argues that architecture plays a critical role in the way people behave and interact. This thesis seeks to sustain this premise by providing a new model in which social networking behavior is manifested in a physical, built environment. It seeks to address the role and effects of social networking as a means in which to break social norms and expectations of privacy, community and urbanity.

In many ways young people are an index of social norms, and their patterns…constitute the playing out of such norms.

   -      Steven Miles, Resistance or Security? Young People and the Appropriation of Urban, Cultural, and Consumer Space

This new model could potentially serve as an archetypical model for other contexts and situations, whether in different academic locales or as a catalyst for urban change at a city-wide level; instigating new propositions for change at a civic scale outside academic boundaries and contexts by using student housing as an index and barometer of emergent social behaviors among young adults and the  eventual dissemination of those behaviors into the general society and built environment.