Avantgarde, Cyberspace, and Architecture of the Future.

A Manifesto [1] Three unprecedented events took place in the late 1980s - early 1990s: The "death" of Architecture. The birth and rapid blossoming of the virtual computer-generated image. The death of Utopian imagination (Avant-Garde, Communism). What is the connection between these events? The "death" of Architecture: Architecture is becoming simply a support for computer-generated images. (Think of the futuristic facades acting as giant video screens in BLADE RUNNER or Rem Koolhaus's competition project for ZKM.) The virtual space created by these images replaces the physical space of architecture. In other words, the image terminates the space. Architecture is reduced to a shelter for the image, not unlike a TV set, a billboard, a movie theater, turned inside out. As ARCH+ put it in 1991: "The facade becomes a screen." [2] The death of Utopia: Gone are the avant-garde fantasies for a new society and a new human being. Consumption, fragmentation, capitalism, and virtuallity rule. Not by accident, the fashion for post-modernism and the death of Communism occured simultaneously. All that is left of Utopia is an architectural corpse (V.I. Lenin's mausoleum) containing the virtual body of the ultimate utopian thinker. Modern avant-garde architecture dreamed of transforming people by placing them in an ideal space. Like contemporary audio-visual architecture, avant-garde architecture was purely utilitarian because it served the sole purpose of creating the virtual experience. Audio-visual architecture tries to accomplish this through the scale of its facade-screens; avant-garde architecture -- through the psychophysical impact of its spaces. The spaces, designed to make you tremble, resonate in rhythm, surrender yourself for a common goal, fight until death. Is such progressive architecture still possible today? The dream of modern architects to bring about a new society through the design of the physical space was compromised. Having given up this dream by the 1960s, architecture was already waiting to be taken over by a computer-generated image; the takeover we are witnessing today. Thus, the birth and development of a computer image appears to finally kill any possibility of progressive architecture based on the premise of creating nourishing, motivating, harmonizing physical spaces. Yet, it is exactly the same development which can finally allow progressive architecture to fulfill its promise. THE ONLY SITE LEFT FOR THE UTOPIAN ARCHITECT TODAY IS CYBERSPACE. Instead of constructing actual buildings, architects will build 3-D worlds everyone can enter by putting on head mounted displays or similar virtual reality gear. Instead of creating utopian physical spaces, progressive architects will design virtual spaces. The architecture of cyberspace will succeed where modern architecture failed. Utopian architectural imagination is no longer limited by physical reality. Its only limitation is the speed of "rendering engines," the speed which is increasing daily. The dream of transforming people through the experience of space can finally become a reality. Of course, the physical space will still exist but it should be designed from a completely functional viewpoint -- as a machine for virtual living. Therefore, the goal of the progressive architect today is to minimize the cost of building the physical space in order to save all the resources for maintaining the virtual world. I believe that cyberspace architecture will be the logical conclusion of modern architecture. Today we finally have the technology to transform people through the experience of space. The computer-generated image will make it possible to re-animate utopian architecture and the very idea of Utopia.