A Prouvé of plumbing, a Rogers of rewiring

On the Nest thermostat, and the need for transformation of the service layer, rather than the surface layer, of buildings and cities

Ed. A shorter edit of this piece was first published at Dezeen on 1st May 2014.

I have an image in my head I can’t shake.

It’s of a fictional 3D model.

It’s a model of all the pipes, cables and wires in London, from the Tube and sewers up to every single bit of piping, cabling and wiring in every single building, from homes to offices, stadia to stations. Millions upon millions of metres of the stuff. Some pristinely wrapped in recent plastics, threading fibre-to-the-node; some centuries-old crumbling channels and disintegrated husks of sewage ducts, fused with the sodden mud that it long ago pierced; most somewhere in-between, in varying states of disrepair, held in suspension in the London clay.

With that solid mass of London lifted into the air, with a Minecraft-ian weightlessness, the clay can be hosed away and the cables, pipes and wires would hang there, glistening and shimmering like an early computer graphics wireframe model, a form to be pawed and swiped, rotated and revolved. A marvel of engineering, spotted with damp, grassy clods of pyrite…