The implications of technological progress in architectural thinking: The future impossibility for an architecture of hiding

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the future of architecture of hiding which is encountering the constant pressure of technological advance. The open society and its increasing surveillance are requiring human behaviour to adjust to new realities of hiding. One estimate puts the number of surveillance cameras around the world at 245 million and another reckons there will soon be over twice that number in China alone [1]. Consequently, the perception of hiding architecture is changing, and its romanticism is facing a serious threat. Up to 20th century, hiding an object - space - to the degree of resembling alienation or nothingness assumed meanings addressed to intellect and to the body, meanings imposed by threats or by sanctions. In its ancient Greek version, one could grasp the space by means of a thought-process capable of perceiving them as a totality and endowed with meaning. But today, the boundaries between inside and outside are being dissolved for an observer who through technological means is able to move freely in space and time, defeating the hiding architectures and its three-dimensional spatial perception. To quote Henri Michaux: “I put an apple on my table. Then I put myself inside this apple. What peace! [2]” The advance of technology has made hiding a matter of self-perceiving which has only a distant link to geographical reality. The underground space remains the prime solution for hiding but the increasing conversion of underground structures and military fortifications into data centres tells that the importance of data storing is surpassing that of physical hiding. Instead, the architecture of hiding is transforming into the architecture of living without traces. Technological progress is taking us to a milieu in which the tracelessness of the fugitive becomes the representation of the hidden space. However, as Peter Sloterdijk puts it forward in Bubbles [3], what lends modern psychological knowledge its strength and autonomy is that it has shifted the human position beyond the reach of geometry. Now, the space created is being conceived before it is actually “lived”, meanings are no longer conveyed by a continual putting-to-the-test of the emotions, and humankind is adjusting to new realities by finding other means of hiding, presumably through architecture of data and digital cryptography.