Visiting an architectural masterpiece, or touring a building we helped design, is one of the many great rewards of architectural study and practice. Yet even if we think of ‘architecture’ as a rich, experiential, and tangible phenomenon, the daily practice or study of architecture is, in many ways an intangible, or otherwise ‘virtual’ reality, and it always has been.
A design idea certainly doesn’t ‘exist’ physically, if perhaps only as study models, sketches, or in our own imaginations. We study architecture through illustrated and photographed architectural periodicals, books, and websites, though they are equally intangible or abstract. We draft CAD drawings and building information models, yet they too exist only virtually and possess none of the social, interactive or experiential magic of ‘architecture.’
If we can’t afford a trip to Wisconsin to see Taliesin, the best we can do is substitute the visit with the abstract experience of reviewing words and pictures in books or websites. We can’t prototype ideas at full scale with bricks and mortar, so the best we can do is build digital or cardboard study models. We can’t bring back historical buildings that have been lost to the wrecking ball, so we resurrect them through writing, digital animation, or old photographs. These too are all ‘virtual’ or otherwise abstract experiences.
Like it or not, we spend the vast majority of our time in the practice, patronage, or study of architecture in a virtual, imaginary, or otherwise intangible realm.
In fact, this conceptual realm is the very essence of architectural ideation. From the moment the need for a new building becomes apparent, conceptualization of that building will invariably exist in a conceptual state – virtually – until construction is completed.
Yet despite the pervasive nature of these virtual or intangible realms in architectural discourse, we are incredibly limited in our ability to interact with (and within) this virtual realm. When we do use technology to help visualize design, we do so at an arm’s length, and as relatively isolated and passive observers – a pattern that shares almost nothing in common with the characeristics of architectural experience in the physical world. Even the most sophisticated modeling software leaves us working in isolation, with completed renderings and animations as only prescriptive windows into the digital world. In this way, we are only able to absorb a small fraction of the experiential spectrum we think of as architecture.
Even in the earliest virtual world platforms available today, such as Second Life or OpenSim, the materials that would otherwise be static and passive can be brought to life through enriched social, interactive and collaborative opportunities that have never before been possible. Instead of treating a digital model as a static artifact, it can now become an habitable ‘place,’ accessible by anyone, anywhere.
This changes everything. The ‘reality’ of architecture as we know it, alongside potential or past realities such as digital study models, building information models, recreations of demolished historical buildings, visualizations of theoretical design concepts, educational diagrams, and quite literally anything you can imagine, can now be brought into a vibrant, social, interactive, shared and collaborative online space.
Considered as a whole, we can see the boundary between the real and the digital growing increasingly porous, where we can quite literally ‘occupy’ and experience the digital fabric or underpinning of all past, present and future architectural realities. Digital models that had once been static artifacts can now become a layer in a dynamic digital fabric of virtual model-space; figuratively laced into the atomic surface we consider the ‘real’ built environment.
