John Frazer - The Architectural Relevance of Cyberspace

A new consciousness - a new mode of thinking - is emerging with profound implications for architecture.

The parallel world of cyberspace, created and sustained by the world's computers and communication lines is just one manifestation of deep cultural and technical changes which are reshaping our understanding of our world. This shift of perception from a universe of objects to one of relationships is the characteristic paradigm shift of the century. With this goes a shift from specialisation to generalisation, from the self-conscious to the unselfconscious, from linear relationships to complex webs. Our emerging new world view is characterised as decentralised, desynchronised, diverse, simultaneous, anarchic, customerised...

The term cyberspace is used loosely to describe the invisible spatial interconnection of computers on the Internet and it is also applied to almost any virtual spatial experience created in a computer. But tangible space and physical structure have already taken on a new significance as a result of the growth of cyberspace.

Virtual reality has caused us to reassess reality.

Old world architecture has achieved a new physicality just as the new architecture of process starts to transcend physicality and achieve ephemeralisation.

Ephemeralisation: the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing" Buckminster Fuller.

Virtual worlds should not be seen as an alternative to the real world or a substitute, but as an extra dimension which allows us a new freedom of movement in the natural world.

Contemporary science fiction concentrates on the coexistence of the real world and the metaworld of cyber-space. The realisation gradually dawns that we have been living in a virtual world all along.

The argument rested on the idea that architects were 'first and foremost system designers who had been forced to take an increasing interest in the organisational system properties of development, communication and control', Pask identified a significant vacuum in architectural theory and claimed cybernetics as 'a discipline that fills the bill in so far as the abstract concepts of cybernetics can be interpreted in architectural terms (and, where appropriate, identified with real architectural systems) to form a theory (architectural cybernetics, the cybernetic theory of architecture). Thus cybernetics in architecture was advanced as a new theoretical basis and as a metalanguage for critical discussion.

Frazer, J. The Architectural Relevance of Cyberspace in Architectural Design 1995, Academy Group, London, UK.