Chaya Bhardwaj

Trust: It's in the Facade.

Trust holds societies together. Trust can also be measured. This virtual architecture project and film broadcasts the data associated with global perceptions of trust in key institutions. Facades of buildings have long been the physical interface between institutions and the public. The facades of banks, stock exchanges and parliament buildings act as physical markers of trust and symbols of permanence. This project uses the historically driven language of facades to translate contemporary data on the state of trust in the world.
In the research portion of this project I studied how stock and commodity exchanges rely on the purposeful transparency of information to create trust within the trading process. These diagrams track the rituals and a time-based sequence of events that are used to create consistency across the internal transfer and external broadcasting of information while it is changing in real-time.
Exterior tower, interior stepwell.

The facades of nations are displayed within an exterior tower and interior stepwell that is the virtual venue for discussion and research to better understand trust. The perception of trust by the general population of each country is annually evaluated and translated into a score along the trust index. These facades function as visual ciphers that translate this numerical data into a spatial and social experience. In contrast to a world’s fair, where a country designs a space that represents the image that they would like to convey to the world, the design of these facades are dictated by scores on the trust index.

Each floor of a façade represents a year of collected data, with the ground floor as the current year. Their architectural features represent more specific data points and trust levels of institutions.
The direction, intricacy and shape of architectural features represent degrees of the perception of ethics and competency. For example, windows represent trust in the media, columns represent trust in business and roofs represent interpersonal trust within communities.

The facades provide a global overview and in many cases a generalization of the state of trust in the world. This data is generated through public opinion polling which aims to develop a transparent snapshot of a sampling of people that is meant to speak for an entire population. The towers and pavilions in the center of the stepwell provide opportunities to zoom into the data on trust. They aim to address the question “how do we trust the data on trust?” by providing specific lenses and filters for how to read the data. They attempt to reconcile the divergence between the conventional understanding of public opinion and the everyday reality of public opinion.

Reading devices at the top of each tower highlight testimonials and individual perspectives overlayed on top of the data of a nation.

The public opinion polling that we have become accustomed to generates statements such as “I strongly agree that I trust people I meet for the first time”. However, this is not conversational language and these types of statements are only created with the intention of measuring data. The reading devices in these towers reveal the underlying individual opinions on trust through the aspirations and fears that people have throughout their lives. These filters depict a multiplicity of world views.

These different lenses track the years of data, provide further detail on the translation of architectural features and present a multiplicity of world views
Every year the stepwell grows to accommodate a new year of data on trust. This space is permanently under construction – adding new floors but never taking them away. This reflects the evolving nature of trust and value-based data.

Trust holds society together. Without trust, societies struggle to innovate, evolve, and grow. The absence of trust causes friction and conflict. People who trust are more inclined to believe
information coming from leadership and are more willing to engage with how their institutions plan for the future. Simply stated, trust enables societies to flourish.