RAM House

Ram House - Atelier Clerici - Photo : Delfino Sisto Legnani

Does your home have an airplane mode?

RAM House is a dwelling prototype that explores the home’s response to a new definition of privacy in the age of sentient appliances and signal based communication. As the space of the home becomes saturated by “smart” devices capable of monitoring their surroundings, the role of the domestic envelope as a shield from an external gaze becomes irrelevant: it is the home itself that is observing us.

Ram House - Space Caviar

The RAM House responds to this near-future scenario by proposing a space of selective electromagnetic autonomy. Wi-Fi, cellphone and other radio signals are filtered within the space’s core by various movable shields of radar-absorbent material (RAM) and meshing, preventing signals from entering/exiting. Just as a curtain can be drawn to visually expose the domestic interior of a traditional home, panels can be slid open to allow radio waves to enter and exit, when so desired. RAM house is a proposal of cohabitation with technology other than by a constant default presence.

Ram House - Space Caviar

In search of a hut for the electromagnetic refugee

Ram House bedroom - Photo : Delfino Sisto Legnani
Ram House facade - Photo : Delfino Sisto Legnani

The home, one could say, is the mirror of architecture’s soul. As we peer through the window of the radical dwellings each generation has begotten, we gaze deep into its collective subconscious—like a trapdoor into the dreams, aspirations and anxieties of a consciousness that is distant yet somehow familiar. We adapt our homes to who we are, and then we adapt to our homes: the production of new domesticities is our key mechanism of survival, as primitive and enduring as Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Primitive Hut.

So what does the smart home tell us about who we are? What domestic demons is the Roomba really grappling with? As private homes were first wired up and plugged into the electricity network in the early 19th century, domestic appliances increased in performance and entirely new ones were developed. Brooms got replaced by vacuum cleaners, knives were suddenly battery powered. Advertising for electric appliances promised more leisure time for the housewife thanks to their reliable flawless performance. This was the promise of home automation—the smartness of our homes would liberate us from the need to preside over them.

Ram House bedroom tatami mats - Photo : Delfino Sisto Legnani
The kitchen is fitted with Dornbracht's latest Smart Water system. This is a smart home, after all - Photo : Delfino Sisto Legnani

As we drift towards a domesticity drenched in technology by default, and our homes evolve into a brazen assembly of technical apparatuses, themselves nodes within an unbounded infrastructural network, this hard-won sentience of our homes comes across as both beguiling and vaguely unsettling. An electromagnetic fog thick enough to cut with a knife hovers over the city—radio waves, light waves, radar waves, sound waves cram every band of the spectrum, unhampered by walls or by architecture, propagated by devices we barely understand. These devices become our life companions. They talk to us, and to each other. Little by little it is dawning on us that the very place we instinctively go to seek shelter from the gaze of “the inquisitive”, as Le Corbusier quaintly put it, is the place where we are most closely observed. There is literally no place to hide when it is your home that is watching you.

Ram House looking in from outside - Photo : Delfino Sisto Legnani
RAM (Radar Absorbent Material) - Photo : Delfino Sisto Legnani

For sure, there are benefits: we do not have to leave our homes anymore, as we can now sit back while the the outside visits us inside. The notion of the smart home casts architectural definitions that have stood for millennia into doubt, and its greatest achievement to date is the conclusive defeat of the wall—an architectural device for the production of privacy, rendered essentially useless by the fact that it is entirely ineffective in regulating the flow of information broadcast by our houses, the way we rely on it to obstruct the broadcasting of domestic sight or sound. We are beginning to realise that it is in our smart homes that we are at our most exposed, standing naked like emperors as our devices look on. It’s time we admit we’ve lost control of the technology we designed to make life convenient.

Should our homes have an airplane mode? Maybe the age of intelligent machines calls for a new notion of domestic architecture—a revised definition of the primitive hut, tailored to the needs of the electromagnetic refugee. How does the value of visual privacy from the neighbours stack up against the value of electronic privacy from the entire world as a priority? Both should be an option, a choice made on a daily basis. This is the challenge for the domestic architecture of our time: how to become more than a passive support for the sentient devices we will inevitably sooner or later adorn it with. History is circular: we should remember that the home’s utility as a device of autonomy, a space of isolation from collective scrutiny is not a prudish bourgeois tradition—it is a necessary condition for the perpetuation of democracy.

Ram House - Space Caviar

Credits

Project team: Joseph Grima, Tamar Shafrir, Simone Niquille, Giulia Finazzi
Structure & cabinets: Prokoss-Mobilrot
Kitchen & shower fittings: Dornbracht
Bathroom fittings: Duravit
Furniture: Fratelli Levaggi
RF insulation: Geco-lab
Flooring: Artepronta

Exhibitions:

04/06 – 31/08 2015
Museo Villa Croce, Genoa
14 – 19/04 2015
Atelier Clerici

Press

Awards

Icon Eye Top Installations: Salone del Mobile 2015
FastCo Innovation by Design 2015 Finalist