RealRoom(s)
Peripheral Architecture for the Nestlé World Headquarters

RealRoom(s) is an experimental architectural project for the Nestlé World Headquarters in Vevey (Switzerland). This project proposes to insert a series of spatial entities into the air conditioned intermediary areas at the very heart of the building. The RealRoom(s), informed by atomic clocks, luminosity, heat, pressure and humidity sensors, are distributed in a regular framework across a space representing the entire globe (one RealRoom per time zone, on 0°, +/-30°, +/-60° and +/-90° latitude). These RealRoom(s), connected permanently, directly recreate in an artificial but perceptible way, a global "terrestrial spatiality" fitting to the scale of Nestlé in 2005.

With RealRoom(s), fabric | ch's intention is to propose new modes of architectural "presence", in a contemporary space which is not uniquely material and localized, but whose spatial spectrum covers a much wider field: from material to non material, from visible to invisible, from habitable to uninhabitable, from located to distributed, from unique to ubiquitous.

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From within several different time zones, day and night, from North to South, at various latitudes, in cold and hot weather, each Nestlé office can exchange data, take part in the migration of information flow and work in a simultaneous manner:  in a word, each office can exist today in a worldwide, variable and potentially multiple space.  It is in this space, global in the true sense of the word, that the Nestlé World Headquarters are located, in a recently renovated building conceived in the early Sixties by Swiss architect Jean Tschumi.

Like many other contemporary administrative buildings in Tokyo, Paris, Rio De Jainero, Berlin, the interior space of the Vevey building is artificially conditioned (electric lighting, air-conditioning systems, modern furniture etc.). There is a kind of "global" consensus about what constitutes a "comfortable" space in which to work and live. There is a shift towards "100% artificial" spaces maintaining the same climatic, visual "comfort". RealRoom(s) does not propose to eliminate artificial spaces but to provide new ways to "inform" them, using a global networked environment of data to create architectural "fictions".

Indeed, the RealRoom(s) remain artificial. But, first and foremost these spatial entities become dynamic. Their architectural parameters vary in real time according to climatic, luminous, sound and visual data, connected to various sources of information all over the globe.

RealRoom(s) invites us to consider this artificiality in its “worldwideness”, or to consider the « 100% artificial » space as a fundamentally global and abstract space, distinct from local and factual reality. Thus, RealRoom(s) is a way to conceive these « 100% artificial » places in a global spatial spectrum, which takes into account the new parameters set by our transformed contemporary environment. Architectural concerns about the functionalism of spatial comfort are thus suspended.

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RealRoom(s) is also a thinly veiled reference to a software which transformed the use of Internet and its content diffused on the Web a few years ago: RealPlayer. Suddenly it was possible to see videos (RealVideo) or to listen to music (RealAudio), in a continuous "stream" of data. It was also possible to receive images from distant cameras (webcams), filming continuously the same bit of planet, the same urban crossroads or the same unknown place. Unlike RealPlayer, but by using the same process of continuous stream of information, the RealRoom(s) project proposes to "stream" reality (time zones, light, climate, etc.). It is now possible to encode all this data, to transmit it through digital information networks and then to duplicate, multiply,  and diffuse it as a potential information object and architectural component.

A RealRoom(s) prototype can thus be considered as a computer peripheral. However, instead of displaying images or printing documents on paper, this device is a spatial, architectural peripheral which can diffuse temporalities and places, and interface light, sound, heat, humidity or information. This architectural data-processing peripheral can be connected to distant sources of information and can duplicate or multiply an existing situation. Above all, this peripheral spatiality can also create new architectural fictions, permitting one to block time, to hybridize climates, to live at a satellite rhythm, to connect luminous and climatic flows to oil or stock exchange prices, rather than merely duplicating the same "comfortable" controlled environments all over the globe. RealRoom(s) uses various elements of our physical space to suggest new situations - sometimes comfortable, but also uncomfortable, strange, playful, cognitive,  or oblique.

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In the context of this project for the Nestlé World Headquarters, each RealRoom(s) is blocked on a fixed hour, on a fixed latitude.  So as to preserve this fixed situation, the information source of each RealRoom(s) changes hour by hour. In the space of 24 hours a RealRoom carries out a fictitious climatic and luminous round-the-world trip.  It is always the same time and the same latitude in one of the RealRooms. Only the longitude of the source changes, hour by hour, permanently involving a slight modification of light and a more marked modification of humidity, heat or sound. Thus it produces a new spatiality, at the same time present and distant, built up by information collected in reality. 

The "minor" circulation area of the Nestlé World Headquarters is devoid of any natural referent. Ideally, It is re-occupied here by a series of RealRoom(s) informed by real, "streamed" situations: 
   - 7 levels for 7 latitudes (-90°, -60°, -30°, 0°, 30°, 60°, 90°),
   - 24 + 1 RealRoom(s) by level for a full revolution of 24 hours (from 12 am to 12 pm).
Based on the morphology of the building, 6 time zones are duplicated to occupy the duplicated space of the second branch of the Y. Thus, there are 217 RealRoom(s) in total which invest this intermediary space. 

Rather like 217 slow satellites rotating every 24 hours around the Earth at ground level, collecting and transmitting information, RealRoom(s) reproduces a "terrestrial spatiality", with its extremes, its deserts, its seas, its poles, its cities, its days and its nights, its passing time.  It is this vibrant, perceptible, "terrestrial spatiality, which is created in 217 samples of variable architecture in the artificial spaces of the Nestlé World Headquarters in 2005.

fabric | ch, 2005