As in many other areas of contemporary culture, Virtual Reality has appeared to architecture as a kind of fantasm. Introduced through science fiction, far more developed as speculation than as application, VR today is thus doubly virtual, an image of an image, as it were. Its effect upon architecture so far has been primarily discursive rather than practical, and this may continue to be the case, although it will be interesting to see how this rapidly evolving technology affects the elaborate discourse currently preoccupying architects.
To date, the "real" use of Virtual Reality in architecture, has been been as a representational device, as a sort of contemporary version of perspective. It has been used to allow clients and designers to "walk through" as-yet unbuilt buildings, to get a simulated "first hand experience". VR is currently being used by the Matsushita Corporation in Japanese department store showrooms as a marketing tool, allowing customers to select and arrange commercially available components in the design of their "dream kitchen". While VR will most likely be a welcome addition to the designer's representational techniques, and, like CAD systems, will make it easier to modify and "try out" different designs, the power of VR to represent buildings and cities may be more effective as a communicational device than as a visualization device for designers. VR might even work as an "empowerment" of the client at the expense of the "signature" designer, change the habits of "one-off" design that architects and designers practice, pushing them instead into the more parametric and commercial framework of industrial design, or make clients feel that they can do without many of the services currently offered by designers, whose hard-learned ability to visualize is the source of part of their professional competence. (cf. graphic design)
One of the most striking uses of VR has been for molecular chemists, who have been able to "move around" and combine molecules in VR, to "feel" chemical forces of attraction and repulsion,to "inhabit" an otherwise inacessible world. For them, VR carries the promise of being a "power tool for the mind" enabling them to try out different molecular arrangements using their own proprioceptive senses and intuitions.
I don't think VR holds out an equal promise to architects when they are thinking about possible transformations of the physical world. They already inhabit it and spend much of their time visualizing possible changes to it. Instead, VR and Cyberspace raise two major questions for architects and designers today:
1. What design possibilites exist in cyberspace as opposed to the physical world? In other worlds, is an other architecture now possible, an architecture in and of Cyberspace? and
2. What effect will the increased inhabitation of and investment in Cyberspace have on the physical environment and the practice of architecture?
These questions lead us into what I called the doubly virtual aspects of VR today. They are about the idea of VR, and the life of that idea in the discursive world of architects. The collection of essays entitled Cyberspace, First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt is the most widely available source for architectural interpretations of Cyberspace, although critical debate about Cyberspace and architecture has more recently found its way into critical journals such as Assemblage, the locus of architecture's current and most arcane debates.
I think it important to note the extent to which architects are increasingly coming to assume that it is important that they think about Cyberspace. There is a basic issue of territoriality here. In a sense, cyberspace threatens to pull the ground out from under architecture, and architects are responding either by trying to extend their territory into Cyberspace and its very spatial definition, or in some cases, by reacting against the threat of Cyberspace and its association with other urban and social ills.
For the more ambitious of the "cyberspace architects", VR and cyberspace offer new possibilities for the very definition of space, an extension of architecture's traditional domain. By putting together the "First Conference on Cyberspace" in 1990 and by editing the collection of essays from it, Michael Benedikt laid claim to being the architectural arbiter of cyberspace. It is interesting to note how much a project of control underlies his own writing. His essay in Cyberspace, First Steps sets out to limit cyberspace's "transgressions" of the principles of ordinary space and time. There is an element of pontification here. Without denying the importance of Benedikt's work, I cannot help but interpret it as motivated by a kind of theological imperative. His introductory descriptions of VR as the realization of the Heavenly City seems a kind of dead giveaway to this ambition.
Perhaps the most evocative vision of "architecture" in cyberspace has been given by Marcus Novak, who describes a "liquid architecture" as a dematerialized architecture that tends towards music, smoothly or rhythmically evolving in both space and time. For Novak, " Cyberspace is poetry inhabited." It is the "ancient dream of magic that finally nears awakening". Cyberspace is the habitat of the imagination. In statements like these, Novak's vision places Cyberspace in the tradition of the " Memory Palaces" described by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory (note: the art of memory was also called topical memory referring to the link between place and idea) or the sources of architecture in the sacred "building of a world" described by Marcea Eliade. Like Howard Rheingold, who compares VR to cave paintings, this sense of an ancient dream coming true pervades Novak's speculations.
Yet to many other architects, VR and Cyberspace appear in their discourse today primarily as threat. They tend to assume that the elaboration/inhabitation of virtual worlds will be accompanied by empoverishment of physical world. In bluntest terms for architects: Cyberspace will kill architecture.
On a simple economical level, there is obvious justification for this fear. After all, a huge investment of capital is being made in the infrastructure of Cyberspace, and one cannot help but assume that this investment is being made at the expense of other possible ones. The image of living in a physically empoverished environment resulting directly from the fact that resources have been allocated to virtual environments seems increasingly plausible.
But the fear that Cyberspace will kill architecture is not simply a matter of economics. For many architects and critics, Cyberspace may be the final blow in the de-realizing of the real, in the permanent priveledging of the virtual, in the displacement of the physical world of architecture.
This particular fear is part of a more general fear that humankind is becoming obsolete, that it is creating its own successors through technology and the realization that those entities may escape human control. Manuel deLanda's scenario of robot military historians looking back on their origins in human warfare, with which he opens War in the Age of Intelligent Machines is an example of this fear. Hans Moravec's dream of downloading the information stored in the human brain and transferring it into computers celebrates the possiblity of leaving the human body behind. (Moravec, Hans: Mind Children, The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1988.) His dream is another's nightmare: In "The Seductions of Cyberspace", N. Katherine Hayles sees this fantasy of leaving the body behind and reconstituting it as a a technical object under human control as both a desire for perfect knowledge and total power and at the same time as a way of escape. "In some contexts, leaving the body behind equates to the belief that if the problems won't go away from us, perhaps we can go away from the problems" (p. 163)
Cultural critics of architecture have for some time now been concerned with the derealization of the real. For instance, they see the disney-fication of urban life as an example of our increasing preference for simulation over the often intractable but socially productive experience of the city. Whether these critics celebrate the precession of simulacra, like Baudrillard, or, like Frederic Jameson, see the end of civil society in the these new spaces of control and simulation, they all agree that a radical transformation of the physical and urban environment is taking place, in which architecture is displaced by information technologies and simulation. In Paul Virilio's words, public space has been replaced by public image. Ironically enough, while our current concepts of space increasingly acknowledge this derealization, the expression real time enjoys currency without recognising that this reality is simply measured by our subjective "processing rates".
Southern California plays a particularly important role in these arguments. It is the city where technological fears meet social ones. Los Angeles has a long history as threat to the traditional idea of city. It was the model for the "non-place urban realm" forecast by Melvin Webber in the sixties, where telecommunications and mobility reduced the need for propinquity. It seemed to be a first step towards McLuhan's " global village", of which Cyberspace and VR are latest incarnations. It is interesting to recall that Las Vegas ( Los Angeles' licentious offspring) was the inspirational site for Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown's postmodern attempts to appropriate popular culture into high architecture. Today, Las Vegas is the home of the 900 number and is emerging as the new home of VR. It is currently one of the few American cities experiencing a building boom, so architects should feel some reassurance that Cyberspace and physical space are not totally antithetical. The poignancy of Las Vegas as a city built on an idea, as a neon explosion in the desert, underscores its resonance with images of Cyberspace.
In a recent issue of Assemblage , Christine Boyer, an urban historian, asks "What does it mean for Los Angeles to be simultaneously offered as the visualization of Cyberspace and promoted as the prototypical posturban metropolis?" Boyer, coins the term CyberCity for this juxtaposition and then suggests that the problem with this formulation is that it makes a "category mistake", since it contains on the one hand an immaterial term (Cyber), while the other remains material (City). Now it may be excessively easy to make light of Ms Boyer's problem. It is not so easy to isolate the real from the imaginary. The communication between the two is, after all, the primal site of desire, and in different forms the two main industries in Los Angeles, the defense industry and the entertainment industry play on just that communication. Nor should we make light of her concern for the marginalized "lag-time spaces", or for her anguish at seeing the pursuit of private gain at the expense of public good, particularly in LA. But just why does she hold the idea of the "CyberCity" in account for these undeniably real problems?
The dialogue between the real and the imaginary has found an enormous "accelerator" in Cyberspace and a rich ambiguity in the phrase "virtual reality". We increasingly inhabit a realm that moves almost imperceptibly from virtual to real, and it is becoming difficult to isolate issues that affect one but not the other. I believe that technological developments will continue to add layers of real virtuality and virtual reality to our experience and that these developments wil fundamentally alter our traditional distinctions between nature and artifice. Intelligent buildings will be one way in which these distinctions become blurred in architecture.
While this talk has emphasized the effective reality of metaphors, of fears and/or desires of our social imaginary, it remains true that Cyberspace is still in its beginnings and that it raises issues for us all. Perhaps the framework of architectural discussion can address some of them. One large and obviously unanswerable question is to what extent are existing cultural structures replicated in Cyberspace and to what extent can they be modified? A smaller version of that question can be posed in relation to architecture and cyberspace. What might be the role of architecture and architects in cyberspace? Does it make sense to extend the domain of architecture into Cyberspace, or do the issues of the design and habitation of Cyberspace radically exceed the framework of architectural thought?
As a " consensual hallucination" Cyberspace is increasingly becoming interpreted primarily more as a social experience and less as a spatial one. Can architects give form to both? What can they contribute to the " postmodern geographies of the multilayered real and virtual city?