V2_lab interior architecture
A short text (1998) on the interior architecture of the first floor of V2_, which in 1998 was the V2_lab.
The V2_Lab was renovated in the beginning of 1998. The original design was part of a larger concept for the renovation of the entire V2_ building; this concept, called V2_Engine, was developed in its entirety by computer with animation software, allowing for a non-linear and time dependent architecture. It was the result of a literal media criticism of architecture, because within a medium events progress by means of waves, not just within the topological continuity of the medium itself, but more to induce movement within this continuity by passing on forces within the field. The Euclidean distinction between a point and a line prohibits this, as each point rather effectuates the separation of lines than stimulates their joining. By contrast, here this point constitutes a knot, capable of shrinking and expanding, scientifically known as a SPRING, a non-static point capable of passing on force. In the original design, all forces within the spring were channelled towards the extremes of the building by way of 'strings'. These forces are transported to the extremes by waves and they continuously return as waves, interfering with new forces. All the forces from the central projection space move in four opposite directions through several strings, to return again from these extreme points to where, eventually, in the topological continuity, active and reactive forces can no longer be distinguished and end up in a process where the inflections of the strings are no longer predictable. The resulting design is then no longer a form that can be overlaid on an organizational diagram, but becomes a form process where topological coherence consists of the soft co-ordination of thousands of simultaneously operating diverse forces, making motion and time part of the organization. For V2_Lab, the international Lab for the Unstable Media, this concept is an essential one, as media here are not perceived as belonging to a comfort creating, servile instrumentalism familiar from engineers, interface designers and system operators, but as something that accelerates and destabilizes reality. The virtual is not a so-called parallel world that exists somewhere safely on the other side of reality. It is something that continually charges up the present. Instead of regarding the renovation as something that tranquillizes the existing structure and refurnishes it to death, architecture here assumes the attitude of the furniture and the textile as something which introduces movement into the existing situation, accelerates it, vectorizes, seduces and flexes. In this way we progress seamlessly from a computer generated process of forces, vectors and springs, to inflections in plywood sheets and PVC pipes, to (literally) the vibrations in the tables, the undulations of the floor, to the chairs with adjustable spring legs, to tensions in the four millimetre thick plastic wall (stretched with steel cables and springs), to the flowing transition between floor and tables and then to the tensions within the human body: the arm and leg muscles that provide a constant neuro-electrical background to all human behaviour taking place here, background to behaviour that may fall outside of the diagram, outside the concept of work, background to all human media showing on the foreground, like piles of paper, coffee cups, old newspapers, the glow of computer screens, clothing, voices. In this the design attempts to produce a shift from the optical domain where architecture is always judged towards the haptic where everything is proximity.