Performative Urban Environments: Increasing Media Connectivity

The chapter explores how temporary architectural structures can become media for bottom-up approaches to urban development. Urban interactions in the city developed from the sidewalks were seen as locally bounded neighbourhoods. However, with the advent of contemporary network technologies temporary urban and architectural structures are better understood as complex nexuses of global-local flows and interactions. The paper explores how personal mobile technology and sensor technology can attach the individual perception of place to temporary structures acting as agents for urban experiences. In investigating architectural media-constructions the paper draws on the notion of ‘Capsular Civilization'. Arguing that architectural capsules in the cities' in-between spaces may become the media and places of meaningful interaction by establishing a feedback loop guided by social interaction. Architecture thus becomes the political tool for incorporating change in urban spaces creating new ‘public domains'. Such conceptualization draws on the notion of ‘performative environments' that focuses on what a building does instead of what it is said to be. Architecture becomes dynamic and open and may act as self-organizing, communicative environments for an organized complexity between flows of local interactions and network behaviour. The chapter applies the concepts on the case of the Pavilion Project, NoRA, built for the 10^th International Architecture Biennale in Venice for the network of Food College Denmark.