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If it’s only digital, can it be architecture?

Ever since the explosive rise of virtual forms of building in the mid-1990s, critics have posited that digital tools divert architects from important issues of craftsmanship and constructability. Dennis Shelden, director of computing at Gehry Partners, appreciates that younger architects are literate in complex computer programs, but also notes that, lacking the physical and economic constraints of real buildings, virtual architects neglect important elements that are vital to the architectural process. “You have students who don’t take a building construction class. They know how to design, but they don’t know how a wall goes together,” he says. “In a purely virtual world, there’s no dialogue about the issue of craft and how things are made. A big piece of the richness is missing.”

Flex City, 2002 Winka Dubbledam’s firm, Archi-Tectonics, responded to the gaping void in Lower Manhattan by creating a hypothetical planning and design scheme that adapts to a user’s predictions about the future. Change the state of the economy and the prevailing political party, and the site plan and structures change right along with them. Shown here is a mixed-use plan involving an eco-office complex along with housing and greenspace.

Asymptote’s Couture recognizes the seduction of virtual design to ignore the concerns of budgets, materials, schedules, and program but still believes that responsible virtual architects avoid obsession with aesthetic issues. She adds that virtual architecture faces its own, equally relevant design challenges. “Why it has to be bricks and money as opposed to time and pixels, who’s to say?” she comments. “I think architects have always worked in virtual reality. You’re always talking about potential, and it’s never completely realized actually.” The real world, she says, is full of edifices that should not be considered architecture. “People are so willing to question whether a 3D space conceived for the Internet is architecture. Nobody would hesitate to call the most mediocre building in our fabric architecture. I think architecture should be something that frames our experience, that makes it meaningful, that can inspire.”

Many virtual architects also argue that their ideas and structures constantly inform built works. Ahlquist’s virtual building for ACADIA has helped him develop subsequent projects, he says. Its changing forms and unorthodox angles served as a practice run for the design of an unusual new house in California called Seadrift. The house, built for a climbing enthusiast, has an exterior that acts as a climbing wall, and it has so many twists and turns it can make you dizzy. Like his ACADIA entry, the house’s geometry is too intricate to be resolved in two dimensions. “It helped to be able to build and understand these shapes and odd angles and connections [virtually],” he says.

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