Making connections

They float like an armada of tiny UFOs, suspended from the ceiling of UCLA’s Perloff Gallery. As a visitor approaches, the plastic modules emit light and make clicking sounds, quietly transmitting signals from motion sensors that monitor human traffic surrounding the mobile installation “Lattice Archipelogics.”

“Lattice” is on display at “Effervescence,” an exhibition featuring works by the four-person design collaborative known as servo, which has “hubs” in Santa Monica, New York, Stockholm and Zurich, Switzerland.

Around the corner, servo’s Zurich contingent, Marcelyn Gow watches the activity via red Xs, blue squares and black “virtual agents” zig-zagging across a computer screen. Behind Gow is the Thermocline. Made of ribbed plastic and embedded with tiny speakers and pulsing blue lights, servo’s hard-edged variation on the chaise longue is not built for comfort. Instead, the piece, commissioned for an exhibition last year at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, is designed to subvert conventions of a genteel gallery space.

“We took the prototype of a domestic object -- a chaise longue, a sofa -- and used that to explore how you induce people into situations or positions where, in a sense, you become very vulnerable.” Gow lies back on one of the panels to demonstrate.

“Our ideal vision for this thing is to see four people, side by side, head to toe, says servo’s Santa Monica partner David Erdman. “The idea that you would import a private environment, [represented by] the Thermocline, into the middle of a highly charged public exhibition space, that’s about how you orient the viewer and the gallery. You see someone looking like they’re half-asleep -- well, you’re not supposed to sleep in a gallery, you’re not supposed to have a skirt on and lie down.”

But don’t expect to see Thermocline in your neighborhood furniture store. Servo tailors its one-off prototypes for the gallery space, not the marketplace. “We are not designing goal-oriented, targeted, marketable product that is mass produced and sold,” Gow says. “It’s about staging a kind of event in a very specific time and space, so it’s manufactured for that particular event.”

The team’s highest profile project to date: the pouch-like structures dubbed “Lobbi_ports” that were featured at “New Hotels for Global Nomads,” a recent exhibition at New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

“We call them implants,” says Erdman, pointing to a scale model on the wall. “It’s as if there’s an existing surface of the building, and there’s this port that swells out like it’s an implant. But instead of injecting silicon in there, you’re injecting it with cultural space.”

Like most of their work, Lobbi_ports address a conventional architectural problem: what can be done to coax more utility out the plain vanilla “skin” of a building. “There’s this thing called a curtain wall, which hangs like a shower curtain on the skin of a building,” Erdman says. “We wanted to take the curtain wall and make it structural so people can occupy a space between the existing tower and the new curtain wall.”

But there’s more going on. A closer look at the model reveals tiny bits of gray matter shifting almost imperceptibly, like an Etch-A-Sketch that’s being shaken slowly. “We call it ants crawling on a wall,” Gow says. The animation -- actually “live paintings” contributed by artist Perry Hall -- represents the ebb and flow of workaday activity as hotel guests tap away on computers, listen to CDs, watch DVDs, speak on the phone.

“It’s meant to register the flows of information,” she says. “From afar, you just get a sense that something’s going on, but you’re not exactly sure if something’s going on. But as you get closer, you realize there is activity and [the display] is registering the flow of that activity.”

New approaches sought

Servo coalesced in the mid-’90s at Columbia University, where Gow, Erdman, Ulrika Karlsson and Chris Perry met as graduate students. They shared an intense interest in digital technology and the accelerating cultural blur that called for new approaches to long-standing design issues.

Erdman was primed from an early age to find connections among traditionally separated forms of media. “I grew up watching music on MTV rather than listening to it. And skateboarding culture in the early ‘80s -- if you look at it, there was this transference of graphic and sports activity moving across each other,” he says. “For our generation, when we all went to Columbia, these key transformations in culture were already in place. You wouldn’t make distinction between digital and physical realities because there were a lot of mutations already going on.” The foursome was equally emboldened by the idea of a collaborative enterprise unbound by geographical constraints. Instead, the far-flung servo members would take part in “distributed” projects via e-mail, phone calls, informal “residencies” and frequent visits.

Officially formed in 1999, the quartet organized its first exhibition piece for Berlin’s Urban Issue Gallery and found its name in the aptly metaphorical “servo motors.”

“Those are tiny motors that translate digital code into mechanic processes -- they’re kind of an enabling mechanism that allows two things that wouldn’t otherwise be able to converse, to converse,” Erdman explains. “Collaborating from different hubs rather than being in a single office in one city was very important. We were interested in getting different languages to talk on a geographical level, and we also wanted to play games between the gallery and architecture, or product design and architecture.”

Gallery commissions allowed servo to explore intersections of art, product design and architecture in a public setting. “The gallery has a history with people like Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind, who used it as a space to operate in,” Gow says. “It came very naturally to us that we could operate through galleries to develop large-scale prototypes, do them from afar and organize resources in these different cities. For us, exhibitions were a great way to be able to operate as four people in four different places and do architectural scale work.”

Servo’s timing has been propitious because exhibition organizers are increasingly interested in exploring new ways of presenting architecture. “The conventional problem for an architect is, how do you engage a gallery space? Typically, you get lots of drawings, proposals, representations of things that outside of the gallery,” Gow says. “But a more recent trend is that curators are asking you to build things in the gallery. They’re not re-presentations of other things, yet they still have aspects of conventional architecture in them.”

If the issues that fascinate servo seem esoteric, it might be because all the partners maintain strong ties to academia.

Perry is a Columbia University professor; Karlsson teaches at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm; Gow has a research grant at ETH (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule) in Zurich; while Erdman is on the faculty of UCLA’s school of arts and architecture. Their resumes list dozens of lecture series, seminars, symposia, workshops, panel discussions, conferences and scholarly articles, including one by Gow titled “Purveyance and the Hyper-Mediated Commodities of Situationist Practice.” Erdman, explaining his intellectual attraction to architecture, says: “For me it had a lot to do with a complicated and uncomfortable intersection between art and science.” When did he sense that discomfort? “In the fifth grade,” he replies.

While servo currently emphasizes theory over practice, it doesn’t mean Perry, Karlsson, Gow and Erdman are uninterested in built projects. They’ve designed a residence in upstate New York that breaks ground in the fall. Still, the group’s mission at this point seems less about putting up buildings and more about provoking fresh thinking from the architectural establishment.

“There have been different periods where there’s been more theoretical work going on. Like Daniel Libeskind’s early work from the 1980s was about not producing buildings but questioning -- what does it even mean to draw a plan? How do you notate space? A lot of schools like Cooper-Union and Architectural Assn. in London were pushing that ‘paper architecture’ discussion.”

Servo wants to invigorate scholarly debate even as the architecture community’s attention has shifted in recent years away from theory and toward brick-and-mortar buildings. “When the economy got stronger seven or eight years ago, it became all about building, economics, finance -- the whole discourse shifted from questioning spatial issues to something more pragmatic,” Gow says. “At servo, we still want to push these questions on a more speculative level.”

Making material smarter

A common theme in servo projects relates to inventing ways to infuse “dumb” material -- for example, the plastic Thermocline seating units -- with “smart” technology, like light and sound. “We see architecture as managing the intersections and layering of networks,” Erdman says. “If you look at development of the cell phone -- it’s now a camera, a video recorder and a cell phone, so the idea that you can layer more networks into things is something we’re trying to deal with. Product designers share a similar interest in terms of how they manage information and to that extent what we do probably shares some similarities to product design.”

To what end? Servo’s habit of “injecting,” “importing,” layering, juxtaposing and otherwise weaving tangible matter with intangible sensory experience relates in to the Surrealists’ jolt-to-the-system aesthetic. “Someone like Meret Oppenheim would take a teacup and wrap it in fur. Suddenly you’re putting the object in another context and setting up an ambiguous zone,” Gow says. “We’re interested in ‘technology-induced ambiguity’: How do you make an ambiguous statement using technology. Something as pedestrian as a motion sensor that you take for granted when you walk through a door at the supermarket -- what happens when you apply it to an unfamiliar situation? It’s different from the Surrealists in that we’re not just placing the object in an unfamiliar context, but we’re exporting the technologies” into a new setting.

“Architecture today has gone beyond dealing with materiality -- glass is about transparency, concrete is about opacity,” Gow says. “We work a lot on software and hardware relationships, where you have the material aspect of the design but at the same time that is overlaid with another what we call immaterial layer of these other technologies -- the motion sensors, the LED, the sound emissions.” And for servo, the creative process often mimics the “zone of ambiguity” evoked by the final product.

“What begins to happen,” Erdman says, “is it becomes difficult to remember where you are in the process because there’s a lot going on -- the idea is sustained somewhere in that flow where you’re trying to look around and see where the other molecules are around you and figuring out what’s going out and what you’re going to end up with.”

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‘Effervescence’

Where: Perloff Gallery, department of architecture and urban design, UCLA

When: Mondays-Fridays, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Ends: May 16

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 267-4704