JAAANKYSPAAACES

JAAANKYSPAAACES

Architecture in the Age of Platform Society

Teachers: Cenk Güzelis & Anna Pompermaier ./studio3 — Department of Experimental Architecture, University of Innsbruck

Teaching Language: English (and German)

Schedule: weekly; Wednesday and/or Thursday

Keywords: Jankspace, Platform Society, Planetary Computation, The Stack, Atlas, Forensic Architecture, Counter-Artifacts, Augmented Reality, Expanded Materiality, Spatial Interfaces, 1:1, Research-by-Design, Worldbuilding, Moving Image, Spatial Computing, Physical–Digital Objects, Platform Capitalism

Design Methods: architectural drawing, mapping, atlas-making, segmentation, image processing, photogrammetry*, 3D scanning*, physical modelling, 1:1 design fabrication, moving image, sound, field recording, interviews, screen capture, archival research, game engines*, augmented reality*, Unity3D*, Blender and Rhino.

*No prior Unity3D knowledge is required; workshops will be held throughout the year.

STUDIO BRIEF PDF >>DOWNLOAD HERE

CONTEXT

If Junkspace described the architectural residue of consumer capitalism, Jankspace asks what architectural conditions emerge from platform society. 

In Rem Koolhaas’s Junkspace (2001), the characteristic environments of late twentieth-century capitalism were produced through the convergence of shopping, air-conditioning, escalators, atriums, suspended ceilings and endless circulation. Junkspace was continuous, interiorised and climatized; an architecture produced almost as a side effect of consumption, logistics and the global proliferation of generic commercial space. It could still be entered, walked through and perceived as a spatial condition.

Two decades later, the systems organising everyday life have changed. Drawing on Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung’s notion of Jankspace, the studio considers its contemporary counterpart not simply as an emerging architectural style, but as a condition generated through the infrastructures, interfaces and behaviours of platform society. Jankspace emerges through the constant friction between bodies and systems that promise frictionlessness: passwords, Touch ID, QR codes, authentication processes, payment interfaces, cloud storage, recommendation algorithms, delivery applications, social-media feeds, automated customer service and an increasing number of devices that require us to continuously identify, confirm, update, accept, subscribe, verify and perform ourselves as users. It is simultaneously smooth and broken, optimised and dysfunctional, convenient and exhausting. 

Its residues are already spatial: delivery riders occupying pavements, dark kitchens hidden behind ordinary façades, click-and-collect counters, scooter graveyards, e-bike charging clusters, temporary loading zones, warehouse break rooms, biometric checkpoints, content-creator bedrooms, home-office streaming setups and virtual production studios. They produce new gestures, occupations, routes, infrastructures, interiors, habits and material realities that increasingly organise physical space.

The shift from Junkspace to Jankspace marks both a transformation in the architectural language of everyday space and a change in the mode of spatial production itself. Where the shopping mall concentrated its systems in a single conditioned interior, the platform distributes its spatial effects through an entire chain of extraction, computation, labour and circulation. A seemingly banal action such as ordering food from a phone may connect a hand in Innsbruck to interface designers, dark kitchens, payment processors, cloud infrastructure, LLMs, routing algorithms, precarious labour, lithium extraction, data centres, server cooling, electrical grids, food delivery interfaces, traffic jam, satellite navigation and corporate jurisdictions distributed across the planet. Space increasingly appears as a by-product of computation as much as of construction or consumption.

Benjamin Bratton describes planetary computation as an accidental megastructure composed of the layers Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User. His Stack offers the studio a way of reading these relations vertically, from the geological and energetic conditions supporting computation to the interfaces and subjects through which it becomes perceptible. Kate Crawford similarly traces artificial intelligence back to mines, energy systems, logistics, data extraction and hidden forms of labour, while her work with Vladan Joler demonstrates how apparently contained technological objects can be unfolded into extensive genealogies of material, political and economic relations. In Calculating Empires and Anatomy of an AI System, they use cartography to unfold apparently contained technological objects into extensive fields of relations, tracing how everyday gestures and interfaces are entangled with infrastructures, territories, labour, resources and systems of power operating at planetary scale.

For architecture, the problem produced by this condition is fundamentally perceptual. Many of the infrastructures organising contemporary space cannot be experienced from a single position. They operate at scales and across distances that withdraw them from everyday perception: behind interfaces, inside protocols, beneath logistics systems, within proprietary clouds and across territories that may never appear together geographically. 

Michel Serres’s Atlas approaches the problem of relating spatially dispersed conditions across local and global scales topologically, through prepositional relations: closed/open, interval, direction, proximity, adherence and immersion — in, outside, between, towards, in front of, behind, near, against, adjacent, among — through which he formulates the broader question of how to find an intermediate conception capable of joining, mixing or sewing the local to the global.

Architecture has the capacity to make precisely such relations spatially present. Drawing, modelmaking, montage, mapping, moving image, design interventions and augmented reality will operate as methods for reconstructing relations that are otherwise dispersed.

The studio JAAANKYSPAAACES therefore understands architecture as a critical and spatial practice capable of bringing distant conditions into proximity, exposing the infrastructures hidden behind ordinary situations and constructing new relations from them. Through research and design, the studio asks how these dispersed systems can be translated into architectural propositions and design interventions that make their political, material and technological conditions readable, while opening up other ways of organising, inhabiting and imagining them.

STUDIO OBJECTIVE

The studio investigates how architecture can trace and spatially reconstruct the hidden relations of platform society. 

Students will develop these investigations through atlases, moving image, 1:1 build design interventions and augmented reality, translating research into architectural propositions.

The first semester focuses on dissecting an ordinary image through The Stack and developing a forensic, essayistic atlas that connects objects, infrastructures, actors, territories and systems across different scales. The atlas becomes both the research output and the design field from which the project develops.

The second semester translates selected relations from the atlas into 1:1 architectural design objects. These works carry the research forward by giving material and spatial form to relations that are otherwise dispersed, hidden or difficult to perceive. Extended through augmented reality (AR) and moving image, they culminate in immersive installations that make the studio’s research publicly readable and spatially experienceable.

METHODOLOGY

The studio begins with groups of two or three students selecting one ordinary contemporary image as a core sample of platform society. During the first weeks, Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack will be read collectively, with each group taking responsibility for one of its six layers — Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User — and presenting it back to the studio. These layers will form the main analytical framework through which each image is dissected and traced across local and planetary scales.

The investigation will combine forensic and essayistic methods. Students will work through drawing, mapping, segmentation, archival and online research, fieldwork, interviews, recording, scanning, modelling and moving image, following objects, gestures, materials, infrastructures and actors across technical, ecological, political and economic relations. Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten provides an architectural reference for moving across scales, while the studio shifts from metric scale toward relational scale, following connections as they pass through and between the layers of The Stack.

The collected material will be continuously assembled into an Atlas in which scale, sequence, hierarchy, juxtaposition, overlap, adjacency and spatial proximity become design operations. The Atlas will construct a spatial narrative from the research, bringing dispersed relations into proximity and making conditions visible that otherwise remain distributed across interfaces, infrastructures, territories and systems. Alongside this, students will build an audiovisual archive of found footage, screen recordings, field recordings, interviews and self-produced material, gradually developing a short video essay as an additional essayistic layer.

By the end of the first semester, the Atlas will develop from a field of research into a human-scale 2 ½ dimensional spatial drawing and architectural design object. Drawings, images, texts, models, fragments, screens and other research material will be spatially organised so that the Atlas itself carries the argument of the project and constructs a counter-narrative to the apparently seamless conditions represented by the original image.

During the second semester, the spatial and architectural propositions emerging from the Atlas will be developed further into 1:1 design objects, architectural fragments and spatial interventions. These interventions will translate selected relations uncovered through the research into material and spatial form, allowing otherwise distant, hidden or immaterial conditions to become physically encounterable. Built elements, essay-films and augmented reality will be developed together, extending the architectural proposition across physical, moving-image and computational space.

Lectures, readings, screenings, round-table discussions, tutorials and technical workshops will accompany the research-through-design process throughout both semesters.

TIMETABLE

First Semester

Phase 1: The Image, The Stack and Collective Research

Selection of one ordinary image per group, accompanied by collective readings of Junkspace, The Stack and other selected texts that introduce the studio’s theoretical and methodological framework. Particular attention is given to the six layers of The Stack — Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User — which establish a shared analytical structure for the semester. The work begins through inventories, sources, observations and an evolving audiovisual archive.

Phase 2: Forensic Dissection and Atlas Making

The image is traced outward through technical, ecological, political, economic and cultural relations. Drawing, mapping, scanning, fieldwork, moving image and montage are used to build a forensic and essayistic atlas in which scale, adjacency, sequence and superimposition construct the argument.

Phase 3: The Atlas as a Design Field

The atlas develops into a human-scale 2½ D architectural design object, using depth, layering, transparency, projection, sound and moving image to organise the research spatially. It concludes Semester 1 as both a material synthesis of the research and a design field from which the architectural project and its subsequent 1:1 proposition emerge.

Second Semester

Phase 4: Counter-Artifacts and Expanded Objects

Drawing on détournement, selected relations from the atlas will be translated into 1:1 architectural models and spatial interventions. A counter-artifact is understood here as a design object that reworks, redirects or exposes the materials, interfaces and spatial logics uncovered through the research, using them to construct a counter-narrative and make otherwise hidden relations visible. Each 1:1 architectural model is developed together with augmented reality, so that the built object and its digital extension operate as one expanded architectural proposition.

Phase 5: Interactive Installation & Exhibition Production

The projects culminate in 1:1 human-scale architectural models, AR expansions, video essays and spatial atlases. Together they form a collective public installation in which the research is translated into spatial, material and media-based propositions that can be read, inhabited and experienced. Together they form a collective public installation operating between forensic reconstruction and architectural proposition.