Tooling for the future
applied technology in culture and its architectural use-implications
Imagine a crescent wrench sitting on a shop bench in an automotive shop in central Kansas circa 1947 or so. Why Kansas? It just came to me, let’s ask Dorothy’s implied patriarchal figures a bit later. This particular crescent wrench embodies the utility of a certain period in technological time and space, in part due to its simplicity and the directness of its function. It is fundamentally for loosening and tightening bolts. It’s adjustable. It can be ‘wielded’. If we were to say our capabilities as a human race are embodied in this small object indirectly in an number of ways, how might this be relevant to our digital era, if only through analogy?
To begin, we have an idea of its tool-capacities, an image of what it might look like, a sense of what it is to use this particular tool — even if only through recognizing it as an object of a certain function. We might well be surprised by its actual historical form. This is how strongly temporal technology can be.
The wrench also implies a number of other things; the user has most if not all of his or her fingers, for example, not to mention hands and arms and some kind of central nervous system, all required for its normative operation. The trajectory of human tool-knowledge then can be seen in an ever increasing spectrum of customization, as the complexity and limits of tools both expands and dissolves. Think of a new wrench, built for someone with Parkinson's disease, or no arms at all, allowing the tightening of bolts by anyone of a ‘different’ disposition. It’s immanently possible.
Our sense of what tools are at their core is folded into not just language, but normative cultural behaviors that surround our capacity and tendency to label ‘objects’ whether they be particularly skilled humans (mechanics), food, thoughts, or what a cloud looks like. We are object recognizing mammals with a keen sense of how tools interrelate beyond their mere function (think Duchamp). The function of tools is therefore epistemologically emergent from our very scale, capacity, and physicality as beings. Think of the type of pole an ant might use to pole vault in the ant olympics, for example.
In my view, how we view and understand the tools we use every day has a ‘permanence’ which is, in reality, entirely flexible without our realization. I call this notion tool-stability, and it’s likely an important part of why tools are fundamentally about function over form. Think of forwarding an attachment to a friend by email using your mobile device. Such an action would be fundamentally different if you didn’t bring the intention of what you were sending, and the digital ‘haptic’ knowledge of what buttons to press to execute such an action.
I’ll finally make my point about tools, which is that we should question their normative use, and that such questioning is increasingly barricaded by corporate structures interested in leveraging tools for ‘use’ not for reinvention. The iPhone 14 Pro is an excellent example of this. An object that refuses to move beyond the image of what we expect from it. It has become the opposite of inventive while embodying the normative sense of what a computer in your pocket is capable of. Like goldfish awaiting little bits of digital food, we wait with baited breath while Apple decides for us what is cool (within deregulated financial vacuum structures). Everyone else just moves on reinventing, or sticking to established tool-knowledge outside the drama of the digital fish bowl. Perhaps a computer-phone isn’t the best example, as it is unlike the crescent wrench in being perhaps the least pure tool that exists. A literal Swiss army knife that loses all meaning in responding to far too many commands and capacities. A collapse of the tool into an omnipresent object that interrupts social realities far more than its claim of uniting them.
What might this newfound tool-understanding bring to the field of architecture as a practice? Is the purpose of architecture the application of advanced technologies for the exploration of what tools are capable of? Surely we can post-rationalize such things in a cascade of logic that barrels any idea of sociability out the window. We have been enveloped by technological voices to this very degree. While we can create a compelling rendering in minutes (or seconds) using AI or advanced rendering and visualization software, is what we create any better for it?
OR
Is it the point of technology to find it’s highest and best use for a particular setting and time? A crescent wrench that turns 14,523 bolts in its lifetime surely has a lower use-footprint than one that only ever gets to turn 8 bolts. With our own planet and ecology in the balance, we should take tools (digital or physical) and their efficiencies seriously while re-investigating what ‘objects’ resembling tools are capable of… which implies we necessarily question our own tool-stability patterns lest we be taken advantage of by the great financial vacuum.
