Honeywell, I’m home!

For the first time since the mid-twentieth century—with its labor-saving household appliances and rising quality of life—the domestic is once again the site of radical change. And though domestic space appears to fall within the realm of architecture, architects themselves have been almost mute on the implications of such change. Architecture, it seems, has given up its dreams of imagining how we might live, and so into that void technology is rushing. That tired old trope of “the house of the future” has been replaced by what is now called the “smart home.” The smart home is the network’s great white hope for ubiquitous connectivity. It sounds benign enough, and may conjure Jacques Tati-style mise-en-scènes populated by absurd devices—the smart home is prime territory for farce—but it is also an ideology. It is the house-shaped manifestation of the internet of things, according to which all our devices and appliances will join the network, communicating with us and each other.

To say that the internet of things is an ideology is to suggest that the use-value of the concept has yet to be sold to the consumer. It is easily mocked by skeptical hacks who question the need for talking fridges and washing machines that you can program with your smartphone (“You still need to put the clothes in yourself, right?”).

1. The internet of things has nothing to do with the consumer and everything to do with the business interests of the service providers.
2. - Bruce Sterling

Given that data is the new currency, the internet of things is an epic power grab by the lords of the network—Sterling focuses on the “big five” of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft—to gain control of as much human data as physically possible. As the primary interface of the internet of things, the smart home is effectively the tendrils of the network rising out of the ground and into every one of our household appliances to allow mass data collection and digital surveillance.

Should we plan and build in new ways to accommodate this technological surge, or is it just a case of running a few extra wires into the walls? Can architects continue to design according to age-old principles of good form and sound proportions (or stick to the boilerplate floor plans prescribed by greedy developers, as the case may be)?

So are we in danger of overlooking a similar technical detail when it comes to the internet of things and the smart home? After all, before revolutionizing architecture, air-conditioning was slow to catch on (introduced first in factories and then in cinemas, where it was most cost effective). But there is one salient difference. When air-conditioning finally took off as a domestic revolution, after the Second World War, millions and millions of consumers knew exactly why they wanted it. One cannot yet say the same of the smart home.

The internet-of-things evangelists proclaim that it is that most “disruptive” of phenomena: a paradigm shift. Bearing in mind Banham’s assertion that electrification was “the greatest environmental revolution in human history since the domestication of fire,” one naturally looks for equivalent consequences when it is claimed (no doubt accurately) that “the network is the new electricity.” So just how, exactly, will the internet of things revolutionize domestic life?

The potential applications of the domestic internet of things cover a whole array of multi-billion-dollar industries, from security and healthcare to lifestyle and gaming.

In the meantime, there are various intractable problems to solve. Some of them are technical. For instance, it is widely understood that the effective interconnectivity of all our household devices—their ability to sync and update and communicate with each other—depends on a single unifying platform. All tech companies agree on this and that is why they are all beavering away at solving the problem with their own proprietary platform that will not work with all the others.

It is a truism worth restating here that our homes are increasingly the primary sites of production.

This is not just true of new flexible labor models that allow many people to work from home; it also applies to the so-called “sharing economy” (read the digital rental economy) that allows us to commodify our private spaces so effortlessly. Already, the idea of the home as a retreat, a sanctuary from work, comes into question.

“I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do”

The most obvious and often-raised concerns about all of this, of course, have to do with privacy. The mass harvesting of our data and metadata may not be equivalent to inserting CCTV cameras in our homes, but it is a form of digital surveillance. One might ask whether we are returning to the ancient Greek notion of privacy that Hannah Arendt argued was not particularly private. That private realm was neither considered particularly noble.

1. The private property is the only reliable hiding place from the common public world, not only from everything that goes on in it but also from its very publicity, from being seen and being heard.
2. - Hannah Arendt

Here, the private becomes not exactly public but exposed to other private, corporate entities. The trade-off that the tech companies will offer us in exchange for the smart home is efficiency. And we the consumer will be willing accomplices for the simple reason that we are becoming very used to paying for services with our “free” data—some of these products may even be supplied at next to no price in return for the data they produce.

But there is a fine line between efficiency and control.

As Dan Hill has pointed out, in a city such as London (which has the oldest housing stock in Europe) the smart home will have to negotiate Victorian walls and Edwardian pipes. In London’s overheated property market, money is made hand over fist by simply redecorating, leaving the sins of our ancient infrastructure behind “a kind of nationwide Farrow & Ball sticking plaster.” Because getting behind the wallpaper and updating the wiring would be considered “overcapitalizing.”

Who owns the cloud? Who owns the smart city? Follow the money.

The real financial assets of the city will be measured less in ostentatious skyscrapers than in the invisible substrate of cables and sensors. The implications of what Keller Easterling calls “infrastructure space” for architects and architecture are not entirely clear, but what is fairly certain is that the discipline thus far lacks a truly infrastructural perspective. Data as a tool for creating parametric form has an established, if polarized, position, but a genuine network thinking has yet to infect architecture. Architecture is still focused on objects.

1. Architecture is making the occasional stone in the water. The world is making the water.
2. - Keller Easterling