For the Super Small

We are a society of individualization: single souls fighting for meaning, definition, and place. in our media-induced delirium, we struggle for significance.
Starved for connection, we increasingly insert ourselves into cyber space, cyber culture: online communities have replaced any sense of real face-to-face community.
Architecture is slow, reflective of culture, a frozen monument to a society’s biases and preferences. So where does architecture fit, when our culture has shifted from concrete relationships to that of the ephemeral?
The basic necessities of life that our built environments must meet are no longer just to provide food storage, shelter, or community engagement. Our digital dependence will not lessen, but virtual communities do not rely on real-life relationships. We face a severe shortage of physical interaction.

In a field of isolation, does architecture have the power to reconnect individuals, to build physical community?

In two stages, yes.

First, our architecture must enforce interpersonal affairs by removing the middleman crux of the digital device. Only by absorbing the digital interfaces that guard our persons (removing the laptop, blackberry, or ipod) will individuals have the opportunity to reconnect without hiding behind tech devices. By fully accepting user tools, architecture as form may come to reject the obviously technological. Futuristic will become passé.

Secondly, we must cultivate the super small.
Communal living is contemporarily taboo; Modernist idealists and the Age of Utopias are at their bloody end, hanging on by a few residual fragments. Public housing blocks were an undisputed failure, bare bones of the last vestiges paying homage to (what turned out to be) devastating dystopias.
The Soviet Constructivists had this same idea; “new byt”, they called it, or “new everyday life.” The Narkomfin building minimized living quarters, reducing sleeping space to a single small cell. All public acts were shared. The project, so hated, was never completed and quickly vacated.
Hippy communes are still comical, ostracized by capitalism and practically impossible.

So, then, is ours too doomed to fail?

While these other eras failed, ours has the potential to succeed, because the super small can only exist, and absolutely must exist, within the context of the extra large: high density, globalized culture juxtaposed by the individualism of small space.
When our extra large digital community becomes too engrossing, the extra small discourages excessive alone time- it enforces communal gathering, personal interaction. The extra small can exist in any physical setting, but can only exist communally.
The extra small is adaptable, relatable, human in scale, and potentially local. The extra small can be recyclable, fanciful, luxurious, and unpredictable.
The extra small provides the most basic needs, but depends on a larger context. In this way, the individual is acceptable, but the individual must also connect with others. The new architecture of community enforces individual physicality.