Filling the search field
In the Architect journal Room I read Sam Sundberg´s chronicle about something I found utmost thoughtful. Sam is author and outdoor journalist and he has reflected over the symbol for the 2000 century. This is his conclusion:
If a picture is to conclude the 2000 century it will neither be the crasched twin towers, nor the forests of bragging skyscrapers in Shanghai or Dubai. No, the symbol is the empty search field. We meet it daily in Google, Wikipedia, Spotify, Eniro, the Pirate Bay and everywhere on the web where we are looking for something: the persistently pocking marker. “What do you search for” it asks. “What do you do here?” “What do you want“?
Instead of moving about in the city, chasing along streets and buildings with our eyes, we are seated at our keyboard, staring at the search field. Instead of groping about in countless stores chasing for a good laptop we search for it on the web, cross referring among search engines and sites for price comparisions.
Smart architects have realized that the city space is changing in its margins and thus design and build houses in two dimensions, on our web browsers! Zaha Hadid has reached the most advanced solutions in his Google Earth-architecture – the buildings look better from above than in street level.
Whith a huge investment on smart phones they create a constant presence in the streets. The building The Cloud, proposed at the Olympic arena in 2012, is an internet time observation platform. It takes the observer on a strange sky trip which is full of information noise. This is the empty search field in a physical shape. Because, when climbing up its twisted, windling stairs, blinking and lost, we ask ourself: why are we not at home watching the olympic games in our web browser?
