Physical representations can not change fluidly because they are objects. A fluid effect allows us to produce something that can change rapidly before inevitable obsolescence. Architecture is obsolete before it is built. As our society speeds information, fads, styles, trends, the object must abandon style and embrace a fluid effect. We will become more willing to pay for information and entertainment without objects (the information of a book without the physical object book). We are no longer interested in the object, but rather the effects we can gain from the objects. No one wants a stereo, or a VCR, or a vehicle. What we want is music, movies, destinations.
“No more fantasies of power, speed and appropriation linked to the object itself, but instead a tactic of potentialities linked to usage: mastery, control and command, an optimization of the play of possibilities offered by the car as vector and vehicle, and no longer as object?. The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen?.”38
Architecture is the objectification of the components necessary for the effect. Architecture gratifies. This is why objects are created. Architecture is no longer capable of gratifying our desire to see ourselves. Architecture is too static, too clumsy, too limited to provide a thought or a language which is relevant to our modern life of continual change, of perpetual evolution, of information, recursive design systems, genetic design, self-regulation, and self-creation. We are evolving to evolution. We produce a system within itself. We create images that change as we change. We create Images of ourselves do not clutter the physical world. They are allowed to exist within the realm of communication, of language, where they can change as we change. We create images in cyber-space because this is the space of language. Language changes. Language is irrevocably linked to the reader, to thought, to the mind. Language is not independent of the mind.
Minimal design allows us to support language without imbedding language. Minimal design allows for effect without the objectification of images of ourselves. Minimal design allows an efficiency of effect, of experience. We can eliminate the objects that supported the effect and have only the effect.
Television, cable, movies, alarm clock, phone, teleconferencing, lights, speakers, computer networks, the internet, voice mail, checkout, room service, directions, suggestions, reservations, the physical objects which are associated with the function that they provide can be integrated and controlled by a computer system, by binary, by language.
As technology continues to infringe on our everyday lives, we must decide whether it is to play a subservient role to life, or whether it is allowed to force itself on us. This design attempts to provide a balance and an either/or. “Being and function are mutually exclusive.”39 Voice technology is expected to take be a $3.5 billion industry by 2001. Do we really want to talk to computers? More importantly, do we want computers to talk to us? The ATM currently reads “I cannot process your request.” The program I am writing this on has an animated staple, my assistant, who gives me advice. The strength of this proposal lies in technology fulfilling needs in the background, working so that we are not forced into thought while we are in the state of direct perception.
Architecture is built to gratify. Architecture must be a system that supports effect. The effect must be total and all encompassing. And this effect must be personalized. We no longer want an image of ourselves, instead we want an image of ourself. “The triumph of consumer society is a triumph of all private goals over all public goals.”40
