Manipulating Environments - Philippe Rahm

Malcolm McCullough once said that he liked to recreationally reprogram his thermostat. I wonder whether he knows that he has this in common with the Swiss architect Philippe Rahm, who told an audience at Princeton last week, "When you create a space, you create a climate."  His architecture is environmental in a literal sense: he creates ecosystems and climates: by changing variables like temperature, UV light and oxygen, he experiments with new types of spaces that might be recreated. As the cell phones rang both of the organizer and himself (!), Rahm described the invisible environments that he creates within his spaces -- spaces in which he seeks to "invent a new geography" by the climates he creates.

The Hormonorium, the Swiss Pavilion in the 2002 Venice Biennale, manipulated levels of UV light and oxygen in the room in order to shift hormonal levels within its visitors, making them feel less fatigued and more stimulated. 528 fluorescent tubes under clear plexiglass construct the floor, and illuminate so brightly, they make the boundaries of the room disappear. The flooding of UV light creates a decrease in melatonin level, waking up and turning on the visitors. Bringing the oxygen level down to that usually found at 3000 meters stimulates the production of a hormone that increases red blood cell count and improving physical capability. The room changes the physiology of its participants.

Rahm noted how writers like Jules Verne noted how the invention of streetlighting completely changed the experience of  night and day. Diurnisme reverses this effect,  shifting time by recreating the night during the day, with its many yellow-orange lamps. The effect works on melatonin production, which operates on the blue and red wavelengths of the eye but not the yellow.  The room played 18 Diurnes, composed by Rahm as an inversion to nocturnes. (See Régine's review of Diurnisme on We Make Money Not Art)



 © photo Adam Rzepka, Centre Pompidou

In the discussion after his lecture (and at dinner later that evening), several people pointed out the juxtaposition between the visuality of Rahm's very composed images and the experiences they all try to evoke: the images fall flat. And yet, Dean Stan Allen noted how aware he had become of the air-conditioning blowing across the room in the course of his lecture. Perhaps the images don't so much illustrate but evoke.

What if our considerations of smart homes began to work more like this? Granted, Rahm's work is best suited in the closed environment of a gallery: here, it achieves a distance. It would become less punchy and more boring if it were simply made into a building. Nonetheless, I'd rather see smart homes think of shifting the conditions of the environment in order to affect their inhabitants, rather than the <i>Mon Oncle</i>-esque version we see today...