Narrative Potential

What do the eminent architect duo of Elizabeth Diller and Richard Scofidio have in common with the shopping center developers of southern California? One word: storyboards.

Both camps analyze the requirements and patterns of daily routine to establish all kinds of parameters for their work; this kind of analysis may be standard practice for most design professionals, but articulating it in an episodic, storyboard format isn't. Instead of program data, a well-crafted story: one that focuses not on functional requirements but the series of decisions one typically faces during a given period of time, based on lifestyle, whim, and taste. (More on the mall developers in a minute.)

Diller and Scofidio present their vision for a stylishly sustainable dwelling in the NYTimes ("Phantom House," above). Tune into a day of the lives of "J" and "M," whose home is filled with new devices that characterize the (white-collar) sustainable lifestyle of the future:

J. is an engineer for a software-development firm; M. is a consultant for an Internet marketing company. Their house, the Phantom House, sits on a two-acre lot overlooking a rapidly growing city in the American Southwest. Drawing on existing technologies and those that may come to be, it transforms redundancy into efficiency. An indoor, climate controlled house hovers over its outdoor double, so that different household tasks can be performed in- or outdoors, depending on the weather. Pleasure and sustainability converge: the inhabitants and the house form a feedback loop, in which energy produced in everyday activities can be banked and later used to power home systems, and the house can anticipate the inhabitants’ needs as they move from room to room. The Phantom House is a sophisticated desert dwelling that produces more energy than it consumes and gives back to the grid.

(Cough: a two-acre lot?)

Throughout the course of the day, a the Phantom House's embedded technologies quietly ensure guilt-free comfort and convenience, despite the ups and downs of everyday life. A vast network of sensors detects ever-shifting climatic conditions all while responding to and even predicting J and M's movements and preferences.

In hourly installments, D&S show the production and consumption of energy alongside the trajectory of an average day:

As M's car comes within five miles of the house, the Home on the Go unit triggers the DomestiSleep and RapidCool systems to awaken the house and begin to cool it down. M walks inside, throws off his jacket, and prepares a martini. Realizing he has forgotten to pick up the chilies and the turmeric, M leaves J a message and rushes out, overriding the DomestiSleep system.

Meanwhile, back in the present day, Los Angeles developer Rick Caruso explains his process:

"The industry phrase is 'lifestyle center,' but I wouldn't use that phrase either," he said. "They are more akin to streets than anything else. That's what we try to pattern them after."

More than anything, Caruso said, he is trying to "build something I would enjoy … a place where you can sit out, have a glass of wine and watch people. If you create a very interesting, compelling place to go, people will go there to shop."

The developer said he carefully studies how cities are put together and uses that information to construct his projects. "We write stories," he said. "We have story lines of all of the projects."

As with the Eco House for the Future these stories are driving the transformation of the shopping mall into something with a much finer grain, incorporating juxtapositions of high and low culture, public and private space:

The changes in the look and feel of shopping centers are part of a national, if not international, trend that is driving consumers outdoors and enhancing the shopping experience. Locally, operators are adding large indoor playgrounds for children and shattering the mold that once pegged a mall as either high- or low-end — integrating, say, a Target and Neiman Marcus into the same center.

In South Africa, developers are adding sports complexes for local schools near food courts and drive-in movie theaters on parking lot roofs. In Japan and Israel, theaters are stitching the movie complex into the larger shopping culture, tracking consumers closely so giveaways and coupons offer a carefully crafted premium that will keep them in the mall longer.

But because Southern California culture is so intrinsically linked with mall culture, and has some of the nation's biggest shopping centers, the changes are especially profound.

While some crow about Orwellian ways of manipulating everyday behavior, others see the potential of emerging technologies and new, hybrid building types (NB: the drive-in theater on top of the parking lot sounds great to me). Both the evolving mall and the Phantom House benefit from increased attention to human patterns of inhabitation (consumer behavior being implicit here), to different ends: one focuses on energy savings; another maximizes profitability.  William Whyte would get it.

Malls have struggled in recent years as anchor department stores have closed, but owners are looking for ways to maximize their sprawling grounds by adding stores not traditionally found at malls, as well as housing.

The new versions of the mall usually are less monolithic, more stylized outdoor centers that resemble self-contained villages and often face inward. Stuccoed buildings open onto central courtyards or walkways that are designed to take advantage of the mild Southern California climate and allow patrons to linger a little longer and spend a little more.

Critics roll their eyes at what they consider glorified Hollywood sets. But land-use planners say the village look speaks to shifting consumer tastes — away from the sprawling, sterile suburban mall and into something with a more intimate, urban feel.

"The era of the cookie-cutter shopping center is ending," said Michael Beyard, a senior resident fellow for retail and entertainment at the Urban Land Institute. "What were suburbs are really now urban."

One last point, that Ronald Ratner made last year in a Harvard Design Magazine symposium regarding the main ingredients in successful urban design:

If anybody drives our urban design notions, it's the retailer, because we all ask: Now that we've got these great streets, what are we going to do with them? Maybe we need to bring Starbucks in-house in our firms, right? That's probably more important than architects to making a great place. I've got all the architects; they can design the thing. The question is: Will you ever get Starbucks to open or even better, a smaller, more politically correct coffee shop? The notion once was “If you can just get people through. . . .” But what you want to do to activate spaces is retail. Then if you bring people by, they're going to do what Americans do extremely well: consume. Then one hopes that they'll do all those other things that help to make a vibrant place: sit, talk. . . .

Comments

[Sonia]

That's it. The word "sustainable" has officially been co-opted for evil purposes.

I wonder if this "storyboard" approach to design is just a So-Cal thing, or if it will actually spread. It seems to me like that part of the country is so steeped in movie culture that all the design professions soak it up(see bldgblog's recent posts about architecture in movies). Like, maybe No-Cal designers soak up the programming approach, and they would see architecture as "code" that programs human interactions.

[AM Putra]

'consume' as an urban potential, to make vibrant life, whatever bad it is, I'm agree with that statement.

[Sonia]

Hey Chris!

I found out where Diller and Scofidio got their design idea for Phantom House! I rented a DVD of episodes from a classic TV show from the '60's called The Thunderbirds. Here's the house (see the last picture on the page):

http://www.fanderson.org.uk/epguides/tbirds2eg.html#Episode%20Six

The show itself is quaint in its optimistic belief in technology's ability to save humanity. Hey, wait a minute...isn't the premise of the Phantom House the optimistic belief in technology's ability to save the earth?

Do you get the feeling we've come full circle in our attitudes towards science and technology? Remember reading about chernobyl in the 6th grade? Back then, we thought science and technology would be our downfall; now, we think it will be our salvation.