Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution

Front Cover
P. Droege
Elsevier, 1997 M03 20 - 727 pages
The environment, as modified and created by people, is largely about the use of information, its generation and exchange. How do recent innovations in the technologies of information management and communication affect our use of space and place, and the way we perceive and think about our surroundings?

This volume provides an international, exploratory forum for the complex phenomenon of new information and communication technology as it permeates and transforms our physical world, and our relation to it: the architectural definition of our surrounding, geographical space, urban form and immediate habitats. This book is a reader, an attempt at registering disciplinary changes in context, at tracing subtexts for which most mainstream disciplines have no established language. The project is to give voice to an emerging meta-discipline that has its logic across the specializations.

A wide range of professionals and academics report findings, views and ideas. Together, they describe the architecture of a postmodern paradigm: how swiftly mutating the proliferating technology applications have begun to interact with the construction and reading of physical space in architecture, economics, geography, history, planning, social sciences, transport, visual art - but also in the newer domains that have joined this spectrum through the very nature of their impacts: information technology and telecommunications.

The space navigated in this volume is vast, both in physical terms and in its virtual and analogous form. It ranges from the space that immediately encompasses, or is simulated to encompass, the human body - as in buildings and virtual tectonics - to that of towns and regions. We stay clear of molecular-scale space, and of dimensions that are larger than earth.

From inside the book

Contents

Intelligence Environment and Space
386
Chapter 21 The Art of Virtual Reality
421
Chapter 22 Hybrid Architectures and the Paradox of Unfolding
439
Arborescent Schemas
451
Chapter 24 The Declining Significance of Traditional Borders and the Appearance of New Borders in an Age of High Technology
484
Chapter 25 Language Space and Information
495
Both Real and Virtual
518
Chapter 27 Architecture Versus the New Media
539

The Direction of Causality
123
Chapter 9 Marketspace The New Locus of Value Creation
140
Chapter 10 Reinventing Democracy
152
An Intelligent Managerial Initiative
161
Electronic and Physical Links
179
Making the Connection
199
Chapter 14 Open Service Platforms for the Information Society
214
Chapter 15 Environmental Information for Intelligent Decisions
245
Chapter 16 Intelligence About Our Environment
260
Chapter 17 Cities as Movement Economies
295
Chapter 18 Electronics Dense Urban Populations and Community
345
Chapter 19 Paradoxes and Parables of Intelligent Environments
354
Chapter 28 Recombinant Architecture
551
Chapter 29 Immutable Infrastructure or Dynamic Architectures?
584
Chapter 30 Intelligent Building Enclosure as Energy and Information Mediator
599
Chapter 31 Computer City
624
Chapter 32 Interactive Strategies in Virtual Architecture and Art
632
Chapter 33 Hybrid Architectures MediaInformation Environments
642
An Environment for Electronic Manuscripts
663
Or Living Online with Others
682
About the Authors
711
About the Editor
726
Credits
727
Copyright

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Page 525 - Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.
Page 378 - From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defence, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984).
Page 525 - So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones "which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions.
Page 529 - Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man's. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else.
Page 248 - Environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level. At the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities, including information on hazardous materials and activities in their communities, and the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes. States...
Page 22 - This account privileges the capability for global transmission over the concentrations of built infrastructure that make transmission possible; information outputs over the workers producing those outputs, from specialists to secretaries; and the new transnational corporate culture over the multiplicity of cultural environments, including reterritorialized immigrant cultures, within which many of the 'other' jobs of the global information economy take place.
Page 376 - A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.
Page 687 - To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we badly need.

About the author (1997)

Professor Droege directs the Liechtenstein Institute for Strategic Development, and is President, Eurosolar and General Chairman, World Council for Renewable Energy. He initiated the Chair for Sustainable Spatial Development at the University of Liechtenstein while holding a Conjoint Professorship at the Faculty of Engineering, University of Newcastle, Australia. An inaugural member of the Zayed Future Energy Prize jury and Expert Commissioner at the World Future Council he served on the Steering Committee of the Urban Climate Change Research Network at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and CUNY. He taught and researched at MIT, held an Endowed Chair in Urban Engineering at at Tokyo University’s Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, and Chair of Urban Design at Sydney University. He has authored/edited eight books.

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