ARCHITECTURAL ‘PRODUCTS’ IN TIME OF ‘MASS PRODUCTION OF SINGLE PRODUCTS’
اواسط قرن بيستم، توليد انبوه مسكن ابتداي قرن بيستم، خط توليد انبوه نيمة نخست قرن بيستم، تبليغ و تربيت مشتري از سوي معماران نخبه Middle of the 20th century, mass produced residential architecture First half of the 20th century, elite architects promoting and educating customers
In the past two decades, new evolutions have emerged gradu- ally transferring industrial societies of the twentieth century to ‘postindustrial’ societies of the twenty-first with their new digital services and facilities; societies whose distinct quality is new configurable goods and mass production of single products. That is also the case in architecture. If James Watt’s invention in the nineteenth century suc- ceeded in replacing Manual Labour with Machine Power and if Conveyor Belts in the beginning of the twentieth century served as the moving force of Mass Production, today comput- ers are becoming the Steam Engines of a new age known as Post-Industrial where the moving force is ‘digital’. As we know, it was Mass Production and factories which created the grounds for the formation of a huge labour class, development of the middle class, emergence of metropolises and finally consumerist societies in the twentieth century. In architecture, it was the idea of Mechanization and housing demands of a huge new urban population which induced archi- tects’ reaction forming the Modernist Movement in Architecture with qualities such as functionalism and Rationalism. At that time, both industrial and construction ‘goods’ were designed and promoted by manufacturers. Even distinguished architects accepted the duty of ‘educating’ the customer in this process. These evolutions resulted in a change in the role of the new cities and the constant circulation of repetitive construction cycles. With the improvement of computer technology in the past years, mass production of monotone products went into de- cline and producers started presenting ‘single products’. Here ‘customer’ is no longer the last link in the chain of ‘production- consumption’, rather consumer’s commission and demand becomes the most important link while producers see their success in an efficient response to such demands. In this new process, ‘goods’ (such as cars, computers, clothes, etc.) are first configured by customers and then produced. The most important characteristic of new post-industrial factories is producing these ‘single’ and ‘individual’ goods according to customer’s demand, a new process where each product can have a different ‘configuration’ from the product just before or after it on the production line. Definitely the ad- vent of this new era and its developments will, similar to other developments before, not only revolutionize the appearance of
the society, but also the core and inner social layers of it. This is a change to which architects must respond finding answers for the new demands of new classes (still in the process of formation). Yet, it should be admitted that finding an architectural an- swer to this issue and mass production of single goods accord- ing to customer’s demand would be much more complicated this time because on the one hand, customers these days are used to configuring and buying ‘complicated’ products and will become even more so in near future. On the other hand, en- hancing the demands of such a customer is not an easy task in architecture. Mass production of such ‘new answers’ would require an experienced team and a great technical knowledge of ‘design-construction’ continuum and would generate con- siderable material costs (for hardware and software support). This is a process that architectural offices renowned in the international scene and people like Patrik Schumacher (one of the shareholders of Zaha Hadid’s office) pursue under the title ‘Digital Architecture’ or ‘New International Style’. In such construction, architects (and finally future customers) will be able to produce new single products by changing of a number of design parameters and configuration. In other words, it seems that in future we will see more offices with more than a hundred employee and projects, great cash flow and powerful moving forces in marketing, trying to satisfy their different customers with desirable products in line with their demands. Parallel to this, there will be young and creative architects grown up in the Digital Age who are familiar with computer and its world but enjoying limited opportunities. In the current issue of Memar magazine we tried to represent the position of a young generation of architects in the past two decades through publication of in-depth articles. it is a generation competing for a share of strategic architecture for itself and its country.
* Negar Hakim born 1971 in Isfahan. She received her PHD in history of art from the University of Vienna. A member of Art historians of Austria, and is a researcher of modern architecture. In Vienna she has co-curated exhibitions on topics in the field of art and architecture. She is actively involved in cultural management and cultural transfer between Iran and Europe, not least through the organization of art exchanges. She has written numerous articles on modern architecture, which have been published in respectable and official magazines and books in Iran and Europe. Currently she is teaching at the private university Linz (Austria).
ابتداى قرن بيست و يكم، توليد انبوه تك محصولات منفردEarly 21st century, mass production of single products