In examining cyberspace in architecture, I am taking the opportunity to push beyond an easy conflation of cyberspace and the internet. I want to situate my notion of cyberspace in the history of architecture. In
Cyberspace: First Steps (1991), architect and theorist Michael Benedikt defined cyberspace as “a globally networked, computer-sustained, computer-accessed, and computer-generated, multidimensional, artificial, or ‘virtual’ reality.”
To some extent, Benedikt’s definition resonates with my continually developing working definition for the term. The focus on computer technology specifically is tricky as I’d like to think more broadly about technology, but within architectural culture major shifts in representation and design have coincided with the advent of computer technology. Architects have been producers and consumers of programs that redefined what was possible in terms of architectural expression. I believe elements of cyberspatial thinking existed long before the term came into common usage in the 1980s, so I have chosen the 1960s as a point of departure for examining connections to architectural thought. The 1960s were a time of reimagining the modern city, early usage of computer technology in architectural practice, and continual critique against the sterility and attempted purity of modern architecture. Since the 1960s, many architects have been using computers as part of their design process and have drawn on the possibilities of new technology to push the at boundaries of what can be done with buildings.
Inspired by new technologies and responding to conventional architectural norms, some architect’s designs were primarily articulated on paper as commentary and exploration. Archigram (Architecture+Telegram) was group that developed in the early 1960s by young architects Peter Cook, David Greene, Mike Webb, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton and Warren Chalk. The initial output of the group was a series of publications (newsletters/magazines) that presented new ways of imagining architectural projects, urban forms, and social connectivity. They were not only calling into question their most recent forbearers (modernists) but the fundamental ideas of constructing spaces as stable, solid buildings. “Archigram’s designs destabilized the fundamental assumption that architecture is a static art: Archi-gram was unconvinced that a building’s firmitas (solidity) was the necessary precondition of its utilitas and venustas (utility and beauty), as Vitruvius’s foundational equation of the Western architectural tradition had ordained.”
Archigram was rethinking their field of practice and in doing so, they were reimagining, designing, and communicating new ways of conceptualizing spaces – from the individual home to urban landscapes. They were inspired by and responding to the changing social landscape. There is no singular argument made by the group and in fact there were “ongoing heated arguments between various members of Archigram as to what architecture might be, or what it might do, in the dawning age of technological innovation and consumerism.”
The group sustained their discussion on architecture, consumer culture, dynamic lived experience – and created predominantly paper architecture that was influential in capturing the imagination of some in the art and architectural communities. Archigram is predominantly known for only a handful of their designs, but a recent project by EXP, an architectural research group at the University of Westminster, has made visually constructing an understanding of their work more possible. The
Archigram Archival Project brings together digital versions of their work that exists in many different collections. The digital archive is a further step in communicating the design ideas of Archigram.
So, why cyberspace? And why consider Archigram within the context of thinking about cyberspace? Much of how I define cyberspace and how I try to force myself out of the trappings of conflating it with the technologies at hand – computers, cellular phones – has to do with engaging in imaginative practices. Cyberspace is not limited to the internet or other relatively recent developments, but it is deeply technological. Archigram’s projects visualized the ways in which urban life were changing in response to technology. During the 1960s, “the city became seen as an immense node of communications, a messy nexus of messages, storage and transportation facilities, a massive education machine of its own complexity, involving all media, including buildings.”
The individual architects in Archigram used the idea of connectivity, transportation, and media to rethink spatial organization as cities became networks, home and automobile merged, telecommunications and advertising were ubiquitous. Monumental, permanent, absolute structures gave way to flexible, dynamic, hybrid proposals for inhabitation and transportation. “The projects included the famous Walking City, Plug-in City and Instant City, which variously proposed the use of pods, capsules, megastructures, inflatable or temporary components, cars, furniture, clothes and gadgets to replace conventional building forms.”
How is cyberspace spatial expression? There is a sense of fantasy within cyberspatial expressions in architecture, but not for the sake of whimsy alone. The fantastical is used to push at boundaries, to seek new ways of conceiving of spaces, to sort out what we want from architecture. Much of what was done by Archigram was contemplative studies on the experience of space in a new highly technologically mediated reality. In some ways their contributions can be seen as reflections
in and
of cyberspace as alternatives to the more concrete forms of traditional architecture. Despite the individual members being firmly attached to the academy, Archigram was working outside accepted architectural building practice. They wanted to be revolutionary, “above all to resist categorisation, to overthrow convention, to reinvent things, to refuse to be tied down, to challenge endlessly, and to work through spontaneity, reaction, naughtiness and fun.”
Their work engaged the technological developments that were occurring and changing the experience of the social environment, particularly during the 1960s and 1970s. Their designs serve as representations of their positions as critical of architectural practice and open to exploring the possibilities of new spatial constructions.
What I see as a potential continuation of the discussion about cyberspace and architecture is the spirit of revolution in design and the use of computer technologies to articulate new spatial realities. The virtual reality of computer programs that allow for detailed architectural modeling can be seen in the designs of many contemporary architects – such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libeskind. I do not wish to slip into a technological determinism that assumes that the technology drives their design vision, but there is reason to believe that the full articulation of their works in built form is highly dependent upon computer technology at this point.
Libeskind, for instance, maintains a firm which “has extensive resources and experience in computer aided design, with Macintosh and PC computer workstations used to produce 2D and 3D presentation materials, working drawings, and construction documents. The office uses email and FTP sites to furnish design documents to consultants all over the world and maintains a video conferencing facility.”
While the firm continues to use traditional sketches, drawings, and models within their design process, perhaps it is in the mediation between the virtual and the real – computer-aided and paper – that cyberspatial thinking contributes to spatial expression. Libeskind wrote that “an architectural drawing is as much a prospective unfolding of future possibilities as it is a recovery of a particular history to whose intentions it testifies and whose limits it always challenges.
In any case, a drawing is more than a shadow of an object, more than a pile of lines, more than a resignation to the inertia of convention.”
A drawing is a communicative instrument and an exploratory opportunity. One of Libeskind’s goals is to create expressive spaces that are transformative, communicative, and expressive of contemporary culture. He uses technology to push at the boundaries of traditional spatial arrangements to engage, disturb, and delight his audience.
Halfway through constructing this paper, I realized that I chose to start this piece from a distance of roughly 50 years, after proclaiming in a previous post that we need not do that. While I still believe that it may not be necessary and we can critique contemporary work, I will continue to try to contextualize what I see as developments in architecture. I am intrigued by distinctions between evolutionary and revolutionary ideas in architectural expression. How much have architects revolutionized their practice in the last fifty years? When did the revolution begin? Have technological affordances made what was once revolutionary design more mainstream? On some level, Archigram seemed to be responding to ideas about humanity’s relationship to the machine within architecture that had been prevalent since the Industrial revolution. Architects who have been loosely collected under terms such as Deconstructivist – including Daniel Libeskind, have continued the exploration of cyberspatial expression, using technological developments to physically allow for the digital creation and engineering of their built work.
In architecture, at least for these architects, I think that virtual reality (though they’d not use the term) was and is a space for imagination – a test ground for what may become real – or built. Archigram’s designs were real in the intention of the ideas but remained virtual in the sense that they were never meant to be fully articulated in built form, they were almost – and always seeking more. The virtual can be seen as place for engaging possibilities – but in the act of communicating, the presentation has consequences. Much of Libeskind’s career was spent in the virtual realm where he was communicating his ideas, but took time to turn toward creating “real spaces that work.”
Having not experienced his built work myself, I am hesitant to speak to how well his spaces work, but I understand they have a tendency to feel powerful. In that, perhaps they can be considered a revolution of sorts.
Michael Benedikt, ed.
Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 122.
Simon Sadler,
Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 6.
Michael Benedikt, ed.
Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 16.
