A critical analysis on concept of porosity in architectural design. Using case studies to formulate hypothesis and tigger discussions .
The concept of porosity we investigate in this article examines three kinds of porosity — Physical Porosity, Sensorial Porosity and Social Porosity- as Richard Sennet presents in Open City. Social porosity is the ability of social groups, or communities, to interact one with another in the same environment. The Physical one belongs to the actual pores of a surface. This allows elementary fluidity, the physical transmission of factors across the surface and within the object. Sensorial porosity is, rather, the capability of inhabitants to perceive certain phenomena over limitations and boundaries: is the ability to overcome tectonic limits. The importance of defining porosity, though, lies in understanding the idea of limit. With regards to this, Sennett describes two urban environments: an open city and a close city. On one hand, a limit can be defined as a boundary: a rigid limitation. On the other, a limit can be interpreted as a border, an element that still divides two conditions, but at the same time offers the opportunity of negotiation. The main feature connecting these two points is the role of perception. In a closed city, inhabitants will face a boundary in the meaning of something decided a priori. This leads to a predetermined process into the development of spaces which will not be porous at all. When the limit becomes a border, as the case presented for the open city, the opportunity to negotiate brings to the possibility of designing porosity as a way to overcome predetermination in order to reach an architecture based on perception.
As a first attempt to obtain this kind of architecture we developed a spatial speculation: The Reverb Pavilion. The pavilion represents an abstraction based on the concept of non-place. The generating idea was driven by questioning the meaning of transit spaces. How many times did it occur to wonder about the identity of a corridor? How many times did it happen to consider the corridor the arriving point to a path? With this intent the room does not exist anymore as a separate entity; it is all a way to connect inhabitants with the outside context. Reverb Pavilion is a provocative building made of two inclined asymmetric walls with an intrados vibrant metallic surface, 50 meters long with a narrow separation between each other. The walls create a homogeneous, dark surface to generate an indefinite perception.
installation in the context in which it will be located. The tallest wall is 4.5 meters high and the second is 3 meters. The rationale behind this is to make the smallest one disappear, according to the perspective under the projected shadow of the tallest one. The user will discover its existence only walking through the void until the end. The building is immersed in the city and replicates the essence of it under the form of its sounds. In this condition, the person at the end of the corridor will be able to perceive all the noises, including sounds connected with the presence of other people, canalized toward them immediately before leaving. Yet, this could be a way to dwell and even understand space only through an act of perception. Trying to achieve the second type of porosity, the Sensorial one, we may argue that this building increases perception allowing to overcome rigid limitations and extends the capability to perceive phenomena. Is this a porous building? Does it create a negotiation?
The pavilion results to be porous only under specific conditions, in a specific environment and reflects only certain sounds. It failed since the operation was to apply conventional rules of composition to create a building that could open the doors to phenomena. The failure of Reverb Pavilion opens up a discussion on the actual possibility of design porosity. Is it porosity a concept that can be described within architectural mediums? This experiments helped in understanding that, at least, an act of defamiliarization could give the opportunity to get close to the design porosity.
Interaction Room, the second spatial speculation presented, operates in this way. Aiming to be a format of feed-backing architecture, Interaction Room explores how human behavior can be influenced by the perception of objects, shape, materiality only by using perception. The theory behind this room, is the one of the affordance and agency as J. Gibson and W. Gaver analyzed. By affordance it is meant the relation between objects in a certain environment. With this intent the user is invited to enter into the room, which is completely dark and detached by the surrounding context, and is free to experiment the space through his body. The volume of the room hosts three objects, one of each is a parallelepiped of 170cmx70x30cm.
The room is equipped with an infrared camera that activates a motion tracking system to detect the user’s position into the room. This space is consequently divided into an imaginary grid associated with a MIDI input that produces digital sound. The generation and emission of sound become the only element of perception and definition of the space. The user, altering objects’ layout, affects the magnetic field and consequently also the whole connected sound phenomena. Only thanks to the sound the user can describe its own space which will be singular and unique since is defined by his personal presence. The experience revealed the agency of the objects and showed them not anymore like limits or limitations: rather as a negotiation. Limits become boundaries. The primitiveness of the cube in which the phenomenon happens wants to be a provocation: inside an archetype each individual can re-frame the space, changing the idea he has about it, only through the use of senses. In order to involve the audience, a monitor was placed inside the church displaying performances that simultaneously took place into the Interaction Room.
In conclusion the user becomes a dweller, a perceiver, of the space by using the perception and then the interaction between his body and the object. Giving the user a place where he can use his perception to act, leads to the creation of a pure negotiation .Secondary outcome is that participants, being a phase of post-experience, were still affected by the immersive noise, therefore felt the reality in a different way. In this scenario that observation refers to the third type of porosity, social porosity, where the inhabitant, aware of its new consciousness, would possibly have the ability to interact more deeply with surrounding space. The Interaction Room does not force inhabitants towards a specific function, it is dynamic and can be managed to describe the kind of reaction they would like to have, in harmony with the system of factors around them.
The Interaction Room represents the evidence of the inhabitants’ capability to acknowledge the intimate peculiarity of a space through phenomena. This act, besides, demonstrates how deep the understanding of the space could be when is not automated by ‘familiarity’. In conclusion, if Sennett describes the porosity as strongly connected with space and urban environment, the experiments described bring to the conclusion that the way of achieving that porosity is for people to become porous.
