Visceral Intricacy III
Digital Prosthetics
Virtual Grammar of Architecture
Introduction
If you ask an architect to choose the single most significant technological innovation in architectural history, he or she is not likely going to look in his/her own epoch for answers. Might it be Vitruvius and Marc-Antoine Laugier theory of the primitive hut? The first sticks and branches that were arranged to conform the first shelter? Or innovations in materials like glass or steel? Or maybe the harvesting of new energy forms like electricity or oil and its subsequent effects on construction? As an abstract thought, architecture exists under the laws of physics in the realm of physical reality. This is literally the foundations of architecture. In our time, we have taken the longest (or deepest) architectural leap in history, we have moved to another dimension. We are entering a digital virtual world. It is in this world, that Visceral Intricacy will operate this term, the new final frontier.
The Deep Leap
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| Petkova & Ehrsson, 2008 |
Through technical innovation we have created computer systems that can simulate architecture and spatial experience in such immersive ways that our central nervous system is deceived and we can no longer distinguish the physical reality from the virtual. The Swedish neuroscientist Henrik Ehrsson scientifically proved for the time in 2004 that the experience of immersive virtual worlds can create clinical outer body experiences by overriding the brains sense of ownership of one’s body and project the mind into an artificial body in an artificial virtual world.
Many modern buildings today not only exists virtually as drawings and models before they enter the physical world in construction but through modern collaborative three dimensional software’s referred to as BIM (Building Information Modelling) a building exists in its entirety before construction begin. Window profiles, plumbing, furniture, air ducts, generators, elevators, escalators etc are allocated in the same three dimensional digital model together with every single other detail of the building down to nuts and bolts. In order for contractors to have full control of complex mechanical systems they now use virtual reality simulations in order to design, document, analyse and evaluate the system.
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| BIM CAVE at Texas A&M’s Department of Construction | Science |
In the digital virtual environment, the existence of a “building” is purely symbolic. It is a reference to a real world structure, created in a space where none of the utilitarian functions - protection from the elements, air condition, seating, etc. - have any relevance. It’s symbolic functions bring legibility to what could otherwise be an incomprehensible abstract space.
In virtual environments like webpages or computer games, if you want to return to where you started, you push the “home” button. If you want to explore new spaces you push the “open” button. If you want to leave, you push the “exit” button. We open and close “windows”, we place documents on “desktops” and organize folders in libraries. This phenomenon has been defined with the term “Skeumorphism”.
In order to navigate virtual worlds we have imitated an existing semiotic grammar. Since virtual architecture does not serve any physical purposes, it is pure architectural language. There is no point to an object or space in a virtual environment if it does not communicate possibilities to us. Content and meaning is always a complicated issue with physical architecture, virtual architecture is nothing but content, which requires a new kind of architect.
Visceral Intricacy believes that architects should and could have a role in the creation of virtual architecture, which would require new intellectual processes and design methodologies where imagination is not only a process but a place. We will create three dimensional spaces build only from information and language in ways that have never been done before.
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| Prometheus 2012. Ridley Scott. 3D virtual map of a galaxy. |
The Dreaming Architect
The ability to create and perceive space free of physicality has always been closely connected and necessary to the working process of architects. Man in general has always been imagining and dreaming but the fact that the imagined belongs to the individual alone means that it is difficult to incorporate in to our life’s where the communal is often more important than the individual. Most of our experience is never activated because it is never communicated or even internally reflected. A lifetime of dreaming possibly including the individuals’ strongest experiences, spatial and emotional often pass by unnoticed due to its non material nature and the lack of an appropriate language. Commonly the concept of real and unreal is the mental boundary used to judge the perceived world but indeed a dream can be even more real and engaging than a material experience of space. It is not the true sensational value that positions the experience, though, but the collective understanding of perception, and that understanding is in our time only repressing our experience. An architect’s vision becomes real the moment it appears in his/her mind, only to later become material, if that was the intention. Indeed it is believed that the architect and his/her associates are the only space generators in our societies but as mentioned, you can read space with your body but also in many other ways that are the product of other disciplines. A writer creates space that is read in code rather than physical material and it is the reader that then decodes the experience and perceives it through his interpretation. Likewise a director of a film uses the vision and audio to impose an experience.
If we now agree that architecture does not necessarily have to be physical in order to exist or be real we can open our minds to a greater spatial sensation, and realize that if you are capable of describing a space to yourself and others, you are creating architecture. Whether you are imagining it, dreaming it, telling it, showing it, designing it or building it. The mind must strive towards a free perception without predetermined value over the spatial sensation for either material or nonmaterial architecture. To imagine it is to design it, and designing it is making it.
Representing complexity
Often nonmaterial architecture which receives many “visitors” exists within some sort of spiritual or religious context, either if it is an afterlife world like Heaven and Hell or an imagined space visited voluntarily trough meditation or reading.
The Gothic Cathedral of Europe with it striking visual appearance and geometrical beauty and complexity is one of man’s greatest architectural achievements. They were built with great effort to symbolize and demonstrate the glory of God’s Heaven, and today they still stand tall in cities as landmarks of a time when architecture was the means to illustrate the greatest places of them all. So it might be astonishing to learn that some of the first cathedrals spaces humans conceived were never meant to be built. Only later were these imaginary spaces translated into material architecture.
These nonmaterial spaces were used by monks in meditation in order to store and recall great amounts of information. The Greeks called it Mnemonics (the art of memory). This complex and intricate system for creating and storing images and words in memory entailed a sequence of steps. First one had to create in one’s imagination a place where the materials to be remembered could be stored. Such imagined places were deeply based on architectural metaphors. The imagined space had to be logical so that the information could be easily found when needed. It is believed that the monks vision of the cathedrals were very similar to the ones actually built much later. The creator after haven created the main architectural elements began to place icons and ornaments in the different rooms and spaces of the cathedral to be able to store many details of information in the space. And if you walk through a gothic cathedral today the amount of ornaments, symbols and details as incomprehensible as they might be makes you understand that there is much to say about why the building stands. What it really is, is a memory bank full of stories to be told.
One of the most intriguing example of such imagined structures was practised and used communally at St Gall. Its plan was drawn prior to the meditation and the monks were guided through the rooms and spaces of the elaborate nonmaterial monetary.
Similarly the Mandala used in Hinduism and certain branches of Buddhism in Tibet is a mental visual representation of the cosmos visited in meditation in the pursuit of enlightenment. And like the gothic cathedral the Mandala is realized as architecture across Asia.
What is perhaps most interesting about these two examples of imagined space, is the transition from nonmaterial to material. But it must be said that all man made architecture has gone through the same transition. The architect imagines and constructs the space in various virtual ways, and then begins the long process of translation into comprehensible communication devices that can then be read and assembled into material architecture. Much like the writer mentioned earlier. But unlike the written word material architecture has the inevitable faith of destruction which could either mean a transition back into imagination or a complete disappearance.
Ayutthaya
Few historical sites have had such a deep impact on a nation and culture as the historical park of Ayutthaya. The entire city and kingdom was destroyed in bloody dynastic struggles in the late eighteenth century and left the old glorious city in ruins as it physically remains today, but virtually, the city and culture of Ayutthaya lives and thrives in the minds of people who either learn from school or through stories on screen and stage. When you stand before the remains of the monuments of Ayutthaya your mind completes the image with imagination, like phantoms one imagines the missing spire of the stupas and absent roofs over columns.
Ayutthaya’s historical park and ruins will be the grounds for our visceral and intricate imagination this term. We will not only complete the missing material parts of the structures but ad information that would otherwise we impossible to perceive. We will create spaces constructed only by information and surround the structures.
In order to be able to create these spaces we must not only learn as much as we can about the old Kingdom and its rituals, hierarchy, social structure, routines, materials, trade etc. But also how information regarding Ayutthaya is communicated today. In the beginning we will be tourists as we analyse the three main museums in Ayutthaya and their communication strategies as well as how the actual ruins are explained on site though audio guides, signs, models, diagrams, guided tours and even role-play. Museum information interfaces are notoriously outdated and give little insight into the depths of possible knowledge one could acquire about an important architectural artefact. We will also study some of the previous projects dealing with digitizing and augmenting Ayutthaya.
At this final stage of the project we will already have spent the majority of the term experimenting and developing systems and understandings for how information can be communicated in three-dimensional virtual environments. The projects will eventually be presented on site in Ayutthaya using available interfaces for augmented reality, virtual reality and beyond where the visitors will be able to see in to the past and future as they are simultaneously touching the brick and smelling the grass.
References:
Ehrsson H.H., Spence C and Passingham RE. ‘That’s my hand!’ Activity in the premotor cortex reflects feeling of ownership of a limb. Science, (2004)
BIM CAVE at Texas A&M’s Department of Construction Science
SCOTT, Robert A. (2003) The Gothic Enterprise. London. University of California Press Ltd
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