Equipotential Space: Freedom in Architecture
Author
Renato Severino, architect. Praeger Publishers, New York and London, 1970. ISBN 0-275-49170-6.[1]
Description
Severino argues that buildings need to be able to change, because the societies inside them are changing faster than the buildings can keep up.
His case runs on four points. Fixed structures constrain the people in them. Rigid architecture holds a society in political and social arrangements it has already moved past. Mass production and prefabricated parts should be used to build environments that can be rearranged, not permanent monuments. And every point in a space should be able to host any activity, so that instead of a building full of single-purpose rooms, you have an open infrastructure that shifts as needs shift.
Severino defines space differently than architects usually do. Most definitions treat space as a fixed quantity with measurable geometry: how big a room is, what shape it takes. Severino says that misses what actually matters, which is the relationships between the people and objects inside it, and those relationships keep changing. He calls the space that holds those changing relationships equipotential space (p. 27).
Three qualities define it: continuity, flexibility, and articulation. An ordinary building is planned around a handful of specific uses, and each room is built for one of them. Equipotential space is built for none of them in particular, which is what lets it be reconfigured for any of them (p. 27).
Frame components and function objects
Severino names two kinds of things that make up a space. Frame components are the fixed structure, and they determine what activities a volume can support. Function objects are the movable parts that do the actual work inside it. He argues that a space becomes genuinely flexible only when these two are kept separate: the frame sets the possibilities and the objects supply the functions (p. 27).
Function objects differ mainly by how many people use them at once. Severino sees two scales: those used by no more than two or three people at a time, and those that must serve many more (p. 28). Function objects are compact by nature, and that compactness is what makes them mobile and efficient (p. 28).
The arrangement also has a time dimension. Objects sit in a volume and their relationships to each other change as needs change, and that change over time is part of what the space is (p. 30).
Universality
Severino observes that a Japanese camera or a German car works anywhere in the world regardless of local social, political, or economic conditions. The same aircraft serve every country. Penicillin fights infection in India, Africa, China, and Europe alike (p. 27).
His explanation is that in each case a task has to be done to an expected standard, and the equipment was developed to produce a response that works widely. These are products of technology, and they start from the assumption that all people share a sameness regardless of local or historical factors (p. 27).
The rest of the book depends on that assumption, and it conflates two different things. A technology working identically everywhere is not the same as a technology meaning the same thing everywhere, and Severino does not separate them.
Use studies
Severino proposes an exercise that anticipates what companies now call space utilisation analytics.
Take an existing institution, a large urban university for instance, which contains nearly every kind of social activity at every scale. Study every inflexibly defined space in it and record what percentage of the time each one is actually being used (pp. 29-30).
His point is that a small, fixed set of components can produce almost any arrangement needed at any time, which makes most single-purpose rooms wasted volume (pp. 29-30).
Freedom
The argument turns political in the closing chapter. Equipotential space, Severino writes, offers the possibility of real freedom, meaning not just the freedom to be different but the freedom to participate as fully as possible given social, economic, and technical reality (p. 29). It is the freedom to shape a solution to an immediate need, and to get a new solution when the need changes (p. 29).
He treats the number of options available to a person as a measure of the control they have over their environment, and therefore as a measure of their freedom (p. 29).
Context
The book comes out of a particular moment. Cedric Price's Fun Palace and Generator, Archigram's Plug-In City, the Japanese Metabolists, and Yona Friedman's spatial city all proposed structures that occupants could rearrange, and all shared Severino's premise that permanence in a building is something imposed on the people inside it. See Architectural Intelligence for the computational side of the same period.
Almost none of it got built. What survives is the argument rather than the architecture, which is why the concept has been more useful applied to software than to buildings.
Related Reading
- (Revisiting) Equipotential Space: Freedom in (Digital) Architecture
- Architectural Intelligence
- Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environment
- Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism
- Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture: City, Technology and Society
- Space is the Machine
- The Poetics of Space
- Place: The Networking of Public Space
- Designing Social Interfaces
- Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
- Cosmolocalism
- Learning from Las Vegas
- The Image of the City
- Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity
