Second Skin: an emergent architecture

Project by Tania López Winkler and Marcos Lutyens

Written by Tania López Winkler

Second Skin is a research project that suggests an architecture that emerges from the person. It is, however, hard to explain in a few words a project as extensive, both in time and implications, as is Second Skin, especially because it involves a new approach to architecture through psychology, which means trying to establish a new vision of a discipline that has existed through out history using another one which is relatively young. Unavoidably, some specifics most be set aside for the time being, leaving the possibility for future approaches and emphasizing the character of project in progress.

The work began without a particular objective, more like the intersection between the individual interests of the authors in a particular point in time: me, as an architect with a growing interest in domestic spaces, psychology and the questioning of given reality which at that time converged in the image of the house, and on the other hand, Marcos Lutyens, hypnoterapist and artist, who at that time collaborated with Marcos Novak in a project which explored the mental spaces everted into virtual realities. Almost by chance we met at Heathrow airport and, almost like a game, we suggested the idea of experimenting with the “the image of the dream house”. We then proposed an audio induction aimed to guiding the listening subject to a space which had the value of a primary refuge. Classmates and professors at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London were the first volunteers involved in this project. The results were incredibly interesting, especially when analysing their individualities and comparing them amongst each other, where we distinguished the similarities in shapes, spatial relationships and materials that repeated in the most personal characteristics of each individual: the patterns and structures of their psyche everted as houses shared elements that, at a greater scale, indicated the possibility of creating a collectivity. The game became a process and the process became architecture.

Second Skin’s methodology begins with an inductive audio, where the in-trance volunteer elaborates a drawing of the visited space – his/her primal refuge-, followed by an interview. This information is translated into digital models that allowing us to graph the relationships between the different houses. The resulting houses may be grouped into families according to their formal characteristics, creating the need to generate a process which would allow us to store and work with the information. With the support of a group in the ITESM Campus Querétaro, we then developed a software that works following a genetic model. In principle, the generic algorithm orders the lines of the houses and generates a morphing. The digitalized houses are fed to the software according to their families, separating their elements and assigning them dominant or recessive values. During the execution, the program randomly selects pairs of houses and performs the morphing. This process is repeated in four generations, obtaining in as a result of the last generation a collective house, which varies every time that the program is ran. Being a summary of spatial qualities, this collective house, deliberately, is not dictatorial with regards to form.

Second Skin is a new kind of relationship emerging between the surrounding and the person. This relationship is derived from the space that has always existed, the space of the mind; of structures that emerge naturally. Through hypnosis, we can separate the person from that which is established by civilization – education, fashion, society, rules, economics, etc.- and become in contact with his/her unconscious. Unlike Freud, for whom the unconscious has a negative connotation –the rubbish bin where the repressed is thrown away-, we understand the unconscious as a primary source that connects us to the cosmos. Carl Jung understood the subconscious in this same manner, reaching the conclusion that the human mind has archetypes, which, when they join us to the cosmos, make us part of a colectivity. The house is parallel to such collectivity: at the end the human need for a shelter – both physical and psychological- is continuous, persistent and universal. When using the mind processes as a model for new design strategies, the architecture becomes a metaphor that hosts the collective mind. The archetypes are expressed naturally in dreams, space that is free from the reason-imposed limits. When becoming in contact with this space free of limits, we can extend and question the learnt concepts of reality, perception, dimension and time, proposing the extraction from people of new concepts of habitability and a primal sense of home embedded in our subconscious.

Second Skin is a connection, an interface between what we know as real and the space that forever exists within us. In this way, when we become in contact with this structures, space identification is generated – since the house is information directly from the psyche translated in to a house- the body being the recipient and interface of this correlation. In other words, through a hypnotic induction we evert a new spatial conception of house, which then becomes an interface between the outer and inner world; once this information is extracted and processed, in presence of the space, the body becomes the interface between the outer and inner space, promoting an internal identification. For Gaston Bachelard the space, more than a mere container of tri-dimensional objects, should be a container of the dreamer’s conscience. For him the house was metaphor of humanity, the place that hosts the dreams, where the soul lives. He understands the poetic image as the concentration of the entire psyche and the house as a topography of our intimacy. Second Skin, on the other hand, extracts through hypnosis the person translated as a house; the psyche as a structure that may be visited. It is to say, the structures are a reflection of the person: the location in space of the different elements correspond to a person. In this way, when in contact with this space, a personal identification is promoted with it. A person’s own space is converted into a true refuge where the soul may find shelter.

After a year of work we found in the words of others how to name the final objective of this project. This I found in a booklet of the Museum of Modern Art of Queens (MoMA QNS) which hosted the “The Changing of the Avant-Garde” exhibition and which synopsis said: “This exhibition celebrates MoMa´s acquisition of an important collection and traces how visionary architecture went from trying to change society to trying to change the self”. Second Skin inverts this relation, attempting to change architecture through the person, leaving behind for a moment the dictatorial and arrogant posture of the architect.

The project continues to evolve and involving more architects, artists and thinkers from around the world. The results of the research are extensive and cover several theoretical aspects – from the questioning of reality as it was taught to us, going through form, the person-space relation, identification, perception, representation, up to the questioning of what is to inhabit- whose importances require an independent development. It is worth mentioning, however, that the lessons learned in Second Skin have been reflected in my work beyond the mere form, specifically in the movement, spatial and sensorial relationships, just as in the identification of the inhabitant with the space.

Terminology:

Eversion: term invented by Marcos Novak to describe the final return of the virtual world into the real world. Opposite to inmerse.

Morphing: the image resulting from the intersection of two others.