The American house is flimsy, expediently conceived, and has always generously invited the introduction of technological devices that contend with existing rituals of the home. The architect here is in the profession of denial, where active suppression of machines and their infrastructural logic cools their reformative social roles. Rarely are machines invited into a room; they are most often concealed within delicate surfaces in which their evidence of flow burrows through, around, and across the framing of the house. As the house becomes smarter, its symbolic and physical structure becomes increasingly undermined and destabilized. Today, architectural elements in the house speak through systems often more complex than the design of buildings themselves. A complex, wired world supports a nascent wireless condition in the exchange.

Houdin’s The House as Apparatus

(1849)

The retired French magician Jean Houdin was an accomplished performer who continued his professional practice within his home amongst servants and guests.  This house, the Priory, was the site of magical occurrences facilitated by electrical, mechanical gadgets. The magic he deployed utilized the dual practice of simulation and dissimulation, where the effect produced on the audience was separated by the visible method of the apparatuses at work. Performances were well lit, with minimal assistants and sleek furniture in an attempt to remove suspicion of any form of mechanized work at play. Thin wires, switches, and electromagnetic materials were placed in obscure locations to be deployed at will. 

At The Priory, Houdin used various tactics to gain greater control over the environment. One such tactic was the rigging of a master clock, connected to a larger system of clocks and alarms located throughout the house. By turning its hands, he could slow or speed time upon command. As a trained clockmaker, automata builder, and amateur inventor, Houdin was able to turn the house into responsive, information gathering, and effect producing architecture that presciently anticipated the control marketed by developers of smart homes today.

The Isolationism of the Post War Home

(the 1950s)

In the Victorian era, the home became a safe haven of rest and rejuvenation in the face of mass industrialization. Through strategies of illusion, the home developed personal codes for behaviors and roles as a means to neutralize associations with labor. We see this in lavish decorations and layered walls, which produced an alternative space for personal construction of values and sensibilities detached from the outside world. This isolationism was reproduced within the post-war suburban home, developed in the shadow of  Cold War xenophobia and anxieties about public life. In California Ranch Style architecture, free-flowing functionalist principles of the interior were framed by hard edges of hedges, fences, and walls. The spaciousness of the interior and mediated view of the outdoors through picture windows seemingly extended the home to a public domain. The television echoed this false sense of engagement to the outside world, providing alternative and internalized social rituals for the nuclear family.

A Safe Fire (1966)

On Christmas Eve of 1966, WPIX Channel 11 in New York aired something special. Instead of the usual oscillation between holiday carols and commercials, a view of a yule log burning in the fireplace of the late NYC mayor John Lindsay played continuously through the evening. The absence of commercials cost the TV station $4000. The programming itself was a great success, however, as citizens in New York gathered around a video of this singular event.  The simulation replaced the ritual of preparing the fireplace and instead offered an expedient, safe, and reliable alternative with the click of a remote. The TV transformed from an object of attention to a passive screen of ambient effects where nostalgic reproductions dampened its saturated dynamism. The relationship between new media in the presence of the home through this Christmas special called for technology to adapt to domesticity and, conversely, for traditional practices of the home to shift in the face of new media. 

Today, the domesticity of the everyday marries value and nostalgia through its wood-frame construction, standardized ornamentation, faux materials, and kitsch extensions. So, what is the yule log of the 21st century?

Live Streaming (1991-present)

1. Coffee Frustrations (xcoffee)

   The first live stream conducted in 1991 in Cambridge. Some members of the Computer Lab “Trojan Room” tired of descending several flights of stairs only to find their object of desire -the coffee maker - empty. To save themselves the trip and insulate against the letdown of an empty pot, they began to broadcast the image of the coffee maker. Camera pointed-  a black and white, icon-sized image of the pot would update three times a minute.

2. Cam @ Home

   Live streaming in the home introduces a new orientation of publicness: a screen-interfaced frontality that produces a new face through the interaction of streamers in their physical domestic environments and the larger public. The broadcast of one’s domestic activity introduces unconventional equipment, alternative fictions, and spatial consequences into the home. Today, users share spaces with studio-grade lights, tethered screens, and exposed wires- turning the bedroom into a site of active performance of non-narrative context where variables of anticipation maintain the sustained attention of the audience.

   As services and gadgets recede into the fabric of the house, screens become increasingly dependent interfaces for communication. The disjunction between the perception of space and its physical reality offers architecture valuable opportunities to question the delegation and representation of spatial and aesthetic effects. On-screen or off?

Conclusion

1. Living Through Screen Simulations

   Screens have the capacity to simulate a range of events and spatial qualities that increasingly distract from the physical, domestic setting. While embedding technology in walls or familiar encasements alleviates expertise for convenience, a mobile reconfigurable screen room that produces qualities of domesticity in and around itself aims to address the speed of innovation today with an open and updateable framework. By building on the screen and extending its physical qualities, immersion has the capacity to complicate virtual-physical demarcation. 

   Spatializing the enclosure of experience creates an obvious gateway to the many virtual worlds we subconsciously occupy. Today the screen exists in all forms of architectural program and style; it is the primary site of interaction with people, of control of our environment, and the primary tool in which we curate the image of ourselves and the space we inhabit. By working on and through the screen, the confluence of digital content and spatial effects of the screen room will have the capacity to both update traditions and accommodate diverse models of living.

2. The Depression of the Bed and the Screen

   Technological services and co-living models have progressively decreased living situations to smaller and smaller radii, shrinking the boundaries of life to bare essentials: a bed and our electronic devices. Due to the minimization and eradication of traditional domestic programs, the bed has become a multipurpose surface where people operate between states of rest and work. Together, these two elements have become the foundation of living. The spatial implications of the screen interior have been mostly ignored and relegated to an interchangeable appendage by architects. As discrete technological devices have slowly eroded communal domestic spaces, there is an opportunity to recast the screen from an object for attentive work and isolated social interaction to an actor that enables collective contemplation and participation within the home. 

   By enabling passage into the screen and letting its contents inform the confines of the home, a more collective immersive relationship between the virtual and physical realm is established.