27: The Characters

The elevator emerges as a unique character in fiction and film. It is made increasingly inviting because of its ubiquitous necessity beyond the screen in daily life. The elevator has made possible the vertical architecture so familiar in our cityscapes. The system of the elevator is controlled and regulated by computer programming language and logic that appears as an incomprehensible jumble to most of us. I am interested in the story of the elevator, in the elevator’s persona, which is embedded in each slice of computer-executable code. Manipulating that code changes the behavior of the system and it becomes “open” to interpretation, intervention and imagination.

Two elevators were constructed as characters for my design development. These elevators utilized the stepper motors programmed using an Arduino micro controller and Wiring language to perform the familiar functions of typical elevators.

They were also programmed with 8 aberrant behaviors, 3 of which were used to inform the architectural interventions on site. The 3 chosen programming functions (referred to from now on as behaviors) are:

A. elevator_love_letters
Brief: The notion of being mythically fated for one another. The ups and downs of love merge with the to and fro of traffic in the big city. The hero and heroine fear to loose sight of one another. The chase with the taxi no longer exits, only up and down from floor to floor.

B. coordinates_of_social_space
Brief: The skyscraper is a social microcosm revealing the deformations of its residents. The floors become rigidly separate levels of a social hierarchy, connected by the elevator alone. The elevator maps coordinates in social space. The system is made up of lower floors with oppressive ceilings and spacious upper floors of the executive class.

C. pages_from_a_diary
Brief: The experienced urbanist views the journey upward without danger, getting stuck is a harmless, erotic moment.

Each behavior references a particular elevator cultural construct revealed in contemporary fiction and film. The selected behaviors were then interwoven into the historical tapestry of an existing site and building in North Point Douglas.