2nd Place, Honorable Mention in the 'Master in Architecture Management & Desgin Challenge', ie school of architecture
The Architecture Practice of the XXI Century
Our life has changed drastically since the early twentieth century, that began celebrating the age of Industry [1], but specially over the past thirty years, thanks to the advances in Science and Technology in response to a new age of information. This is mainly because the nowadays so common and improved use of computer knowledge in everyday activity in all fields (including Architecture). Far behind us is the mechanical era, spirit of “Modern Architecture”. We are now stepping on a virtual ground moving too fast for everyone to reach it. Every other discipline is way behind, and most of the time the only concern is: - How to keep up with this constant change? Forgetting its own state of being, because everything we do has to be digitalized and mediatized through the web and into all screens. This combination of cyberness is today’s only truth. We can ask ourselves: - where space stands in all this explosion of electronic digital age? The only thing keeping it alive and parallel to evolution is a set of artificial paradigms put into computer language by using different softwares and developing units that creates fictional contexts able to live nowhere and everywhere.
Is this part of evolution? People connected on a digital/ virtual world (like humanoids). Once I read that architects need to be always optimistic about the future, the challenge then becomes: - How to dematerialize the space we live in without been drag in this “zombilization”?, and especially when we architects still try to debate old issues of formalism from the last century and concern about traditional shapes of architectural elements. The boundaries of architecture are now broken in this computer age that we live, that is why designers look to other areas and digital phenomena when working with space his functionality and aesthetics, conceptually there is no stopping, neither time for looking back to historical tissues, thus a new infinity range of equations. A wake-up to start processing all kinds of data that eventually will become computational vectors, pixels and algorithms, that will evolve into spatial configurations, making it coexist pleasantly with nature and all environments (natural and artificial).
Historically since the invention of perspective [2], architects had relied on this tool to produce architecture, and today architects need to program actions letting the pixelation and equation of space run free. What is common on these two processes is that both share a mathematical origin and systems related with mathematics are somehow connected via the human body [3]. Evidently we do not share the same kind of bodies anymore because the computerized techniques had liberate us from any true form and spatial organization, and brought us to a new utopia of non-place in space, as a result a more equal and humanize architecture, because there is no difference between artificial and real anymore. Truth can be anything, and anything can be diagrammatized to conceive architecture, and mathematically rendered for men, pixelated in this society of the digital age and overcoming real space beyond our bodies accordingly to the always-changing world.
1. "Architecture in the 20th century began as a celebration of the age of industry and technology; but this is rapidly changing in response to a new age of information and ecology..." James Wines/ Green Architecture, Taschen (p.8).
2."Since Brunelleschi's import of perspective to architecture in the 15th century architecturural thought has been dominated by the split between reality, that is real presence, and representation..." - Peter Eisenman / Feints, Skira (p.203).
3."All systems that relate mathematics (drawings, architecture, music, etc.) connect via the human body. The human body is the vehicle and legislator of this relatioship. But we don't have the same kind of bodies anymore..." - Daniel Libeskind / The space of Encounter, Universe (p.53).
