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Ahlquist scoffs at the idea that his digital work isn’t real. “Just because it’s not resolving issues of being built, I don’t think that rules it out from being architecture. What we do is not about creating a buildable object, but finding different ways to express architectural ideas,” he says.

Asymptote’s online, virtual New York Stock Exchange trading floor, designed in 1998 to help the Exchange manage and visualize its flow of information, informed the recent remodeling of their physical operations center. The center’s design echoes “the liquid quality and weightlessness of the virtual realm,” says Couture, and is even painted in the same blue tones as the Web site. The firm’s skill at utilizing 3D computer forms is also evident in its seaside HydraPier pavilion near Amsterdam. The building’s form was based on a simulation of an airplane wing being deformed by water flowing over it. “The curves and complex geometries are a result of the computer design phase,” says Couture.

From HardWare to SoftForm, 2001 Archi-Tectonics developed this interactive installation with MIT’s Media Lab. It investigates a virtual object, called “Armature,” inspired by the interior shape of a residential project. Above, the Armature is interpreted visually as an experience of light and sound. At left, a taxonomy of variations on the Armature as it is transformed by virtual “operations” such as push, twist, and pull.

The impact of virtual architecture on physical architecture is also embodied in bricks-and-mortar buildings that incorporate cyber elements. ACADIA’s Anders refers to these structures as “cybrids,” combining technology and physicality, and allowing once-hypothesized ideas to become real. “You’ve got your brick, mortar, and concrete, and then you’ve got technological materials that are able to change an environment. It’s one more notch on your tool belt,” says Eric Clough, founder of 212 Box, a design firm in New York City’s trendy Tribeca neighborhood. The company is creating the ***BOX, a cubed living space made almost entirely of glass embedded with LCD screens that project television or advertisements. The firm is planning to make it the focal point of a feature-length animated movie, in collaboration with KDLAB. “I think nowadays building in digital space and animating it is the only way you can direct your dreams,” says Clough.

Perhaps more than anything, virtual architects dislike being sidelined by the frustrations of traditional practice—clients unwilling to take design risks, limited budgets, construction schedules delayed by lawsuits or bad weather. Virtual architecture, constantly mutable, allows architects to break physical, technical, even professional boundaries. They provide, as Couture says, “infinite possibilities for change.”

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