The RAM House at Atelier Clerici

by Bruce Sterling

The RAM House at Atelier Clerici is dismantled now, and no longer standing in the Milano Salone del Mobile — but it was a sister structure of Casa Jasmina. So, in this essay, I want to make some of its lessons clear.

In Casa Jasmina, we approach a house from the point of view of Makers in an Internet-of-Things. The designers of the RAM House faced the same situation, but from the point of view of architects.

What’s different about that? Architects are interested in space. They see a house as a physical structure created in three dimensions. The designers of the “RAM House” call themselves “Space Caviar.”

The RAM House uses materials arranged in space to control wireless broadband. “RAM” means “Radiation Absorbent Materials” (and it doesn’t mean “Random Access Memory,” as one might think). The RAM House directs the flows of data: it protects some things and it reveals some things. But it doesn’t use hardware and software to control data. It uses walls.

It’s entirely proper for architects to like walls. Walls divide the space that is the house from all space in the world that is not the house. The physical envelope of the building is what makes any shelter a shelter. Walls contain space: the square meters of housing space. For the architect, a small SQM house is a small job. A huge SQM skyscraper is a big job.

That’s pretty simple, except that the Internet of Things messes up that arrangement. Now there’s Internet flowing in and out of the objects in the house. The structure’s inside spaces and the outside space are connected in new and unorthodox ways. The walls can’t divide inside from outside any more. That’s a serious architectural issue.

Space Caviar recently published a remarkable book called “SQM: the Quantified Home.” “SQM,” named after “square meters,” has many interesting essays about the prospects for data in the home.

We can frame the problem this way: architects get hired to shelter their clients — with walls. If the walls can no longer shelter the client — (if the walls have been electronically blown open with the Internet-of-Things, if all spaces are under potential surveillance) — then the architect is, well, failing. He has been disempowered. He can no longer serve the client’s basic needs for security, comfort and private control over space. The Internet of Things can make architects look bad; they might seem irrelevant, or helpless, and no one wants to feel that way.

Furthermore, the clients who hire star architects — the rich and powerful people, generally — they really don’t like surveillance. The rich and powerful know well what surveillance really means. For instance, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook didn’t buy himself just one house. Mark bought a house and he also bought all the houses around his house. Why? Because Mark owns Facebook.

Vladimir Putin, for his part, likes to disappear. Putin likes to physically vanish for days on end and then reappear suddenly, just to keep everybody else on their toes. If Zuckerberg and Putin both desire that kind of confidential, semi-visible life, then a lot of the rich and powerful are also going to want that life. There will be a strong demand for it. Someone will have to design it, and supply it, and meet that demand. The RAM House is the kind of place that might meet that opportunity.

So, in the RAM House, the old idea of walls has been re-thought. In the old days, normal walls could manage the rain, the cold, the wind and prying human eyes. That’s no longer enough functionality. The new architectural problem is broadband, radio, radar, anything in the electromagnetic spectrum that can flow through the walls and move data. The RAM House is therefore designed as a “house with an airplane mode.” It can shut itself off from any network. It’s a house that can “go dark.”

A “radiation absorbent materials house” might be a Cold War concrete nuclear-blast bunker, but that’s clumsy, old-fashioned and uncomfortable. The RAM House is a porous, lightweight, 21st-century structure. It’s an ingenious, modern creation of mobile Faraday cages, and foam barriers, and stealth-bomber-style radar-deflection screens. The corporate sponsors of the RAM House were Prokoss, an outfit that builds industrial metal shelving and storage systems. So the RAM House is a set of open metal frameworks in which the screens are deployed.

The RAM House is two stories high. On the bottom level are the kitchen, the toilet, the office, and the pantry and tool shed. These secretive little rooms are made of armored black steel compartments that roll back and forth on sturdy steel tracks. These dark, nook-like spaces spend most of their time hermetically sealed. They pop open only when somebody needs to walk inside them and use them. (This is a Prokoss shelving system that’s normally used to safely store archival documents, but it’s been re-adapted for human habitation, more or less).

The upper floor of the RAM House, with the bedroom, is much breezier. With tatami mats underfoot and porous steel grates around, it has an elegant Japanese feeling. The idea is that, with the passing years, the outer structure will be slowly overgrown with thick vines and defensive cactus. Then the RAM House will have the pleasant look and feel of a green pergola or a trellis, with much diffused and dappled light.

It’s like a Japanese mansion, full of mobile paper shoji screens. Nothing is dense or heavy, but everything feels whispery and mysterious. You certainly don’t want to rudely barge into a house with those defensive qualities. A ninja might ambush you from any time at any angle.

We spent some time on the upper floor of the RAM House, because it was attractive. It was fun to sit on the tatami mats, while we were nine-tenths hidden from the many passers-by at the Milano Salone del Mobile. We could see them, they couldn’t see us. We were poised well above all them, and had an advantage over them from inside our little steel fort. All we needed was some prosecco and maybe some grissini breadsticks, and it would have been as pleasant as a private get-away house on the beach.

The bottom floor, though, with its airtight rolling black vaults, is quite creepy. It has the look and feel of a bomb shelter, the kind of area where people will only live under duress. An airtight kitchen is especially bad.

Seen from outside, the RAM House has a menacing look: spiny, with the stark black and yellow colors of a stinging hornet. Although it is mostly porous, it looks like a defensive pillbox, or maybe a military radar installation. The RAM House is a small, delicate place built to resist enormous, unpredictable attacks from any angle. It is ingenious, but it doesn’t look very civilized. It is a paranoid structure where one lone user has to somehow fight off a whole world full of aggressive spies. It’s like the luxury version of Edward Snowden’s bench in the Moscow Airport.

And, it’s not a perfect solution for security, either. “Radiation Absorbent Materials” can absorb radiation, but there are plenty of other ways to spy on a house. A spy could use a videocam, and just watch the people coming in and out. A spy could listen with microphones. Or a spy could simple bribe somebody in the house to become an informant. Espionage is a serious matter, and walls have never been enough to manage it.

I don’t doubt that the rich and powerful can successfully hide from the world. However, an architect alone can’t do that for the client. That work will need a large, capable staff of security experts: chauffeurs, personal shoppers, bodyguards, social-media managers, public-relations managers. Our sister the RAM House is an architect’s power-fantasy.

The reality is: stone walls can’t make you private any more. The conjecture is: what might walls look like if walls could make you private again?

This is a useful and interesting fantasy to have. It’s thought-provoking, and allows us to think through serious issues in a hands-on way. It’s good to get beyond thought experiments and written essay like this one. People need the opportunity to try to live through potential situations. In Casa Jasmina, we have fantasies, too.

We need to understand that no one design-probe will provide all the answers. Architects don’t think or act like programmers, electrical engineers, or Open-Source Hard Ware manufacturers — but that is a benefit, it’s not a deficit.

The RAM House was a success. As a constructed project in the Atelier Clerici, the RAM House went up fast. It came down easy. It performed its function as a public demonstration for thousands of interested people. These are wonderful qualities for a public installation. It was a difficult achievement that was done with a lot of grace: it was large, complex construction work, but it didn’t injure anybody. It was a Milanese attraction of world-class caliber, and a pleasure to experience. I admired it a lot.

I think that I could even live, more or less, in a real-world structure like the RAM House. But what really troubles me about it — and this troubles me about most demonstration “smart homes” and “houses of the future” — is that there is no room in there for an innocent person. The RAM House makes some sense for a client who might pay well, but it is a grim, scary place for a two-year-old child.

A two year old is special: a human being who is very active, very curious and has no conception of hazards. But the two year old is definitely alive and in the house. Everyone who has ever lived in a house has to be two years old at some time: an innocent person who just doesn’t know, doesn’t care, and can’t appreciate what’s going on.

A two year old is not a smart user. She’s not a participant or a stakeholder. A two year old can’t speak, can’t be reasoned with, is fiendishly active and breaks every grown-up rule repeatedly. All human beings who are two years in age will behave that way: it is universal. A house has to come to terms with the realities of housing this person.

A “house” in which young children can’t thrive is not really a house. It might be a workplace, a factory, a lab, a barracks, a social center for political resistance, or many other useful and worthwhile structures, but someone has to raise children or civilization will cease. We need a lot of debate on what a smart house is good for, but I’m thinking an awareness of the needs of innocence would help this debate quite a lot.

http://www.atelierclerici.com/ram-house