The virtual is becoming its own kind of space. Recent developments in digital technology have transformed virtual realms into tangible spaces that surround human beings. Several technologies corresponding with the spatial appear so realistic so that they are referred to using the word ‘reality’. In this case, the word construction is perhaps the most appropriate; it allows most people to imagine architecture within a virtual environment. The easiest and most general idea concerning this would be connected to the following question: if the virtual becomes a reality, is it not possible for architectural practice to take place in a virtual environment, as we do in our present reality?
However, what is architectural practice? Ironically, architecture has long been a discipline that deals with virtual outcomes. The Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti, representative of Renaissance architecture, differentiated and redefined the role of an architect by dealing with the representation of an architectural building from the point of constructing a building. And so, what is representation? Representation is to simulate or reproduce the subject through a medium. This includes an architectural drawing in a conventional sense—which is, representing a building that is to be built on a piece of paper. Alberti’s idea became the core premise enabling the establishment of the profession of the architect and the field of architecture today. Architects who did not get to physically construct a building perform the task by projecting the subject of construction onto a medium such as a piece of paper or a computer screen. Obviously, architecture as a projection on a medium attains virtual properties. This indicates that there is a sense of virtuality at the basis of all architectural practice.
However, aside from this, buildings that have already been built also have a long history of being tied to the virtual. Looking back over the history of architecture, many architectural buildings have tried to adapt ideas beyond reality to physical materials and actual senses. The prime examples here are religious buildings. Cathedral architecture, which has accounted for many key examples in the history of Western architecture, aspires within the present reality to express or to help visitors experience the virtual reality, the heavenly world or the afterlife. So cathedral architecture is itself full of various and specific attempts to mix two different types of reality in a single space. The urge to pursue complete immersion in the virtual or to mix the actual and the virtual was a long-standing desire of architecture. Its developing process constitutes the history of architecture.
The most representative example of this is the frescoed ceiling of a cathedral building. Fresco paintings originated in the desire to document religious scenes on empty surfaces of buildings, but this gradually found its way into interior spaces, having the effect of expanding the interior space into a virtual realm. For instance, imagine if you looked up at a frescoed ceiling in the Baroque era. The place at which the actual column should end and where a roof should be placed, a virtual column — which is realistically drawn based on the perfect method of drawing a perspective and shading — is drawn and extends from the building to heaven. And above it sits the sky where God and his disciples saunter. This allows the visitors who look up to experience an almost complete immersive experience. Furthermore, in the fresco, three-dimensional decorative elements of a building are intermingled with two-dimensional elements of the painting, destroying the boundary or the distinction between real and virtual. Isn’t this an older version of what we now call VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality)? The most obvious example of this is the frescoed ceiling of the Church of Il Gesù (1584), which is renowned as a prelude to the Baroque architectural style.
Drawing diagrams by Leon Battista Alberti / Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Church of Il Gesù (1584) / ©Joaquim Alves Gaspar
But what if present reality has virtual properties, in the first place? To be more precise, what if spatial experience in present reality also has virtual properties, even before we begin to mention the virtual beyond reality? In the foreword to the book Architecture from the Outside (2001) by Elizabeth Grosz, Peter Eisenman notes, ‘The in-between in architectural space is not a literal perceptual or audible sensation, but an affective somatic response that is felt by the body in space. This feeling is not one arising from fact, but rather from the virtual possibility of architectural space’.▼1 This implies that the actual spaces that we believe to be true are also configured differently based on the arbitrary virtual. This is in line with what neurophysiologist Wolf Singer conceives about the recognition of reality. Rather than a fixed thing, reality is an incomplete hypothesis formed in different ways by negotiating the data of previous experiences within each subject or moment.▼2
In this way, experience becomes more powerful than reality, and the right to determine reality is shifted to the subject. This can lead to the conclusion that both the actual space and virtual space are similar in that their final form and mode of existence rely on the arbitrariness within the subject. In other words, both the actual and the virtual can be made real by the subject. If that is so, how is the virtual different from the actual? Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher often under discussion in the field of architecture, provides a hint here. According to him, the ‘virtual’ is the stage of potential, indicating a recognition of the underlying differences. His famous notion of the ‘Fold’, which was mistranslated and caused architects to create a literally folded form, is his metaphor for the way the ‘virtual’ exists. That means, philosophically, the virtual is a latent state that has its own reality, just without being actualised.
If so, does this ‘virtual’ have the same meaning as the word ‘virtual’ added in front of the name of different technologies? In fact, the virtual environments or spaces that we think of today are new worlds in a specific area brought about by several technologies such as VR or AR. This may be part of the broader semantics of the virtual, or it may not even be virtual. This is a long-standing dispute. When VR was born in the 1980s, people pondered different possibilities for the name. Candidates included not only ‘Virtual Reality’ but also ‘Virtual Environment’, ‘Synthetic Reality’, ‘Artificial Presence’, and ‘Artificial Reality’.▼3 There are two major issues to consider here. The first is the question of whether this is simply artificial or rather more virtual. The second is whether this is simply a sense of presence, an environment, or a reality beyond it. Whether coincidental or inevitable, people at that time decided to give this technology the name with the broadest possible definition. In view of this technology, today we can imagine and implement a new universe (such as the metaverse) that goes beyond the notion of environment.
Interestingly, the result presented by this technology are accepted by many as a ‘space’. VR locates the user in a limitless interiority. Anyone who creates a virtual environment using VR is obliged to complete the whole that surrounds the user. This is slightly different from the space that has been discussed in architecture so far. Like Johan Bettum’s saying, until now, space was not the main outcome in architecture, but a secondary outcome resulted from the design of form.▼4 In other words, space in architecture found final form as a building, not as the continuation of limitless space. Besides, the materials are different; images fill a virtual space. Therefore, the way we experience physical space is characterised by the perpetual reconstruction of beguiling imagery.
The development of image-based technology prompts a strange encounter between various virtual aspects related to architecture. Under the umbrella of reality, it becomes meaningless to draw a distinction between virtual and actuality, and all the worries about tension and confusion between the two become entwined. Representation, which has long been regarded as virtual and treated only in the process, approaches to the subject of experience as a result that is not different from actuality. This can be the most interesting point in the architecture, as this gives a clue to the point that has troubled architecture for a long time, which architectural historian Mario Carpo described with the phrase ‘notational bottleneck’. The development of this can be imagined in two different ways: first, the projection that takes place in the process of notation is more intuitively abbreviated; second, the representation itself will be acknowledged as an immersive built outcome.
Concept image for Virtual House (1997) / ©Eisenman Architects
View of game ‘Roblox’ / Screenshot from YouTube
The name determines the potential of the subject. Just as the name VR is suggestive, so is the name architecture. The answer to questions such as what an architect can do in a virtual space or what new stages architecture might develop depends on the size of the imagination behind the name architecture. This is also important on another point; an architect is not the one who directly develops technologies such as VR or AR. The development of these technologies is a constant, not a variable. If the rapidly changing background is the default, it will become more important than anything else for architecture to embrace the change and react in a flexible manner. The most disappointing situation, on the other hand, is to use the emerging technology only as a simulation tool to assist the conventional design process. Such usage at this level is no different from the emergence of the cinema in the late nineteenth-century, where it was simply used as a device for recording stage plays. Just as cinema served to discover the distinct potential of montage or moving cameras and to pioneer a new era for moving image, could the technology related to the virtual also make significant leaps into an unprecedented realm through its own specificity? Here, it does not matter what the architecture is or what it was. We have already been thrown into a new realm. (written by Jeong Haewook / edited by Kim Yeram)
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1 Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001, p. 49.
2 AAPK et al., Architecture as Fabulated Reality, Seoul: BRIQUE Company, 2020, p. 97.
3 Jaron Lanier, Dawn of the New Everything, trans. Roh Seungyoung, Paju: The Open Books Co., 2018, p. 370.
4 Johan Bettum and Yara Feghali, SAC Journal 6: Breaking Glass - Spatial Fabulations & Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality, p. 99.
Jeong Haewook
Jeong Haewook is an architect, designer and founder of Midday, a studio based in Seoul. He co-edited the Architecture as Fabulated Reality (BRIQUE Company, 2020). He holds his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Design from Seoul National University and a Master of Arts in Architecture from the Städelschule, where he received AIV Master Thesis Prize in 2019. He worked at schneider+schumacher in Frankfurt and at CHO AND PARTNERS in Seoul.
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