Seminar Current Issues (LVA 272.

046) summer term 2011 Peer-to-Peer Architecture Common Thoughts for a Performative Architecture

Jos Francisco Bertomeu Gens

Nowadays we live in a society largely unconcerned mainly due to the comfort of their lives. Both in terms of private goods as common goods, the vast majority of people (or at least those who have the power to change things) cover their eyes and let solve the problem solve to the next generation because they are too busy enjoying their perfect life of wealth and happiness. By this I mean that in today's society, one only cares about himself and his well-being in their little bubble (family, work, and perhaps friends) and the actual big problems of the commons of humanity will fall upon us, future generations. Only a few brave, called rebellious and often criticized and insulted, they dare to speak out for the rest who remain silent. After making this brief and perhaps unfair criticism, since they are only a few who can live carefree, my intention is hereby stating that today society is a vague society, uncompromising and in need of incentives or some motivation to acting for common problems. In the past people enjoyed public spaces as a mean of relating to others, to spend time... Today public spaces do not have such importance, children stay at home playing video games, people stay at home watching TV... Some way technology has made us lose interest in making social life in public spaces and for sure a long list of bad things that I will not discuss in this paper. On the other hand, technology has little by little globalized us, and this is a good point because as we can see current social network, internet or communication networks are a powerful source of interaction. Interact is something we all like and can help solve many problems, we all care more for something if we engage in it helping to "create" it, and this is how the "peer to peer idea works, in which we all can 1

partake of the same thing. To better understand about what is peer to peer idea, lets explain two examples which will help us to get why sharing ideas, in open source way, could be beneficial. The first example I should mention is the operating system Linux. The development of Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration. All the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed, both commercially and non-commercially, by anyone under licenses such as the GNU (General Public License). Proponents of free software argue that the key strength of Linux is the degree of freedom allowed to the users, as embodied in The Free Software Definition: "the freedom to run the program [such as Linux]...to study...and change it...the freedom to redistribute copies...[and] improve the program, and release your improvements." Some fear that this "freedom of choice" primarily offers choices that are not pertinent to the mainstream majority of computer users. This kind of software has a lot of advantages but the most important in which concern to us is that anyone can take it and modify it. That means that not only a group of professionals hired by a company will make the software, but any programmer can help to solve problems or even have innovative ideas to improve it. Thus the software is not close to a small group of people and creativity, collaboration and joining forces probably will create better software. The next example is the Wikipedia. It is a multilingual free encyclopedia of the Wikimedia Foundation (a non-profit foundation). Since its inception, Wikipedia has not only gained in popularity (is among the 10 most popular websites in the world) but its success has given rise to similar projects. There is also controversy over its reliability and accuracy. In this sense, the scientific journal Nature reported in December 2005 that the English Wikipedia was nearly as accurate as scientific articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica. On the other hand, as noted in a report published in June 2009 by the Spanish newspaper El Pais, a study conducted in 2007 by Pierre Assouline, a French journalist, and conducted by a group of students of the Master of Journalism Institute for Policy Studies of Paris, to analyze the reliability of the project came about in a book entitled the Wikipedia revolution (Alliance), whose findings were quite critical. Among other things, stated that the Nature study was lax and biased, and that in his own research, the Britannica was still 24% more reliable than Wikipedia. Two of the main reasons why Wikipedia is criticized in terms of accuracy and reliability of its contents are that the persistence of erroneous details are difficult to detect (not necessarily malicious inaccuracies, but may stay for a long in an article) and tendency to hold more and more articles related to today things (rather than academic subjects). However, a third and equally important factor relating to the issues of content that Wikipedia is experiencing is vandalism (offensive or 2

inappropriate modifications of the articles, which hinder the development of the project), whose long-term solution fails (as in the other two cases) by a continuous quality improvement and by the progressive enlargement of incorporation or articles. Despite the criticism, because of its merits and popularity, the website has gained over the years several awards and commendations. And here, we can observe the effect of something when they let us participate in it. People is encouraged and some way, though perhaps not so perfect with the problem of lack of "strict control" that the open source has, you get something wonderful and great that it may be impossible if a private company will perform it with a small group of experts. These days maybe the problem in which society focuses most of its time is in trying to solve global warming and this requires raising public awareness of the importance of the problem. From here, I will focus on this particular issue, which is not small, and how to solve it through peer to peer architecture. The fact is that we are destroying the planet because energy waste and we must each do our bit. Architects and urban planners, have a great role to do with this problem. It is a fact that one of the main causes of global warming includes buildings with poor heating with oil or coal. According to a United Nations study, houses rise about 40% of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere. With nowadays technology, we can manage climate change, the weight per square meter of a building, the number of m, the amount of CO emitted into the atmosphere, the cycle of materials We are in a world in which we can manage lots of information and since the moment we can manage all this information increases our responsibility as architects and helps to raise awareness of citizenship. There has been a big discussion about the digital divide and the alleged loss of humanism. It is probably backward: thanks to the possible ubiquity of technology maybe a new "Renaissance" based on what we call the biosphere is arising. The planet is calling for community work and the architecture must operate as a basic script. As Enric Ruiz Geli (Spanish architect) said in an interview for the newspaper Clarn: as before was the value of the facade, now is energy. [4] Architecture is not something solid and static, is something live, which act, performs and breathe. Since nature also perform: biosynthesis, photosynthesis. While the architecture of Antonio Gaudi looked at the nature by its geometry, its form, performative architecture does it for its chemistry, its physics and its inner science: trees collect water, produce oxygen, burn CO and are food, plants and medicine factories. If we want architecture to be nature, must be performative. [4] Taking this first big step as architects, we help many people aware of this great problem. If we build buildings inspired in passive houses principles, for example, which by natural means and through interaction user-home-environment, a house user will live 3

comfortable while saving money on energy and in some way we are making him a participant in the solution of the problem while we make it easy. Thus we make the user gets interested in the problem. As he is being part of the solution, unconsciously we have instilled him an enthusiasm for helping, just because we made him interact. Architecture does not have to be "green", it has to behave and operate such as it. The design is not less important, the idea is to get a fusion of design, new technology and sustainability [3]. Building on sustainable design together with new technologies and innovative materials we can create a sustainable architecture. This way not only architects are the ones who can solve the problem, in the moment we introduce so many variables it takes several experts in various fields to create something like this, and here is where the idea of peer to peer architecture comes in. Biologists, computer scientists, new materials experts, sustainable architects and much more people could create a network of ideas not just to build a new type of building, but design an entire city, which will be the "stage" where all the people who live in it, "act" in the performance of life. As the saying goes: two heads think better than one and several heads even more so. [5] After seeing these two great examples of the peer to peer idea and try to find a way to apply it to architecture in a concrete problem, we can conclude that the idea of peer to peer architecture, it is not far from being a great idea and not only to solve the problem that has been treated here, global warming, but for sure it could be very useful for solving other multiple problems as large as this one or even more.

References [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

[3] Digital article about the architect Enric Ruiz Geli. Macher, Julia; Sanchez Granado, Ana. Auge de arquitectura verde en Espaa. DW-WORLD.DE (avaliable at http://www.dwworld.de/dw/article/0,,5014428,00.html)

[4] Interview with Enric Ruiz Geli in the "Diario de Arquitectura" (sumplement of Clarn, an Argentine newspeaper, on July 20th, 2010)

[5] Bahador Bahrami; Karsten Olsen; Peter E. Latham; Andreas Roepstorff; Geraint Rees and Chris D. Frith. Optimally Interacting Minds. Science, 2010; Vol. 329 n. 5995 pp. 10811085

[6] http://www.passivehouse.us/passiveHouse/PassiveHouseInfo.html