The new technologies of the digital world caused changes in architecture and urbanism. New materials, new construction techniques, and new ways of manufacturing and building have changed how we design and think about construction. Besides, these technologies reveal possibilities of interaction between society and architecture, transforming the understanding of architecture and its purpose.
The German artist duo Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta from Studio Drift recently presented an intervention in European historic buildings using drones with lights to complete unfinished or destroyed buildings. The idea was to relate the new technologies to these buildings’ old constructive techniques. The result is images that use architecture to mark the new and the old, showing both what once was and what could be in the future, which, based on the most recent debates, seems to point to digital technologies.
Virtual reality and augmented reality are two tools that have become part of the daily life of architecture and urban planning offices. By using specialized software, it is possible to go inside unfinished and unbuilt projects, giving clients live experiences of the result of what is being proposed, and architects a more assertive contact with project proposals. Evolving from this, the metaverse also brings options to confront built architecture, opening possibilities to design and build entire cities in the virtual world.
The metaverse is the popular name for a possible virtual world that seeks to replicate the existing world and, at the same time, find other ways of living and interacting. Using tools such as the internet and augmented reality in the context of architecture, it calls into question the existence of what is built by neutralizing limitations inherent to matter, such as natural and financial resources and even the laws of physics. Architecture can become a virtual experience, not a built one, through designing in the metaverse, where it is possible to explore shapes and spaces almost endlessly.
Architecture evolved from the need to shelter communities from the weather and predators, manipulating materials available in nature. Over the years, architecture has sought to understand materials and combine them to build. Social and cultural demands – as well as the evolution of construction techniques – have contributed to the spaces we have today.
Throughout history, architectural production has gone through several transformations that can be seen in the built environment. In the past, construction sites were collective and training practices, but they have now been transformed into faster, more efficient, and controlled environments. Digital tools can also interfere with the built environment or even impose new questions for architecture, just as industrialization was fundamental for the change in production that also resulted in a formal and aesthetic change in architecture.
By dematerializing architecture, we fail to look at fundamental elements: the way we use space and the built environment reveals both the social relations existing in the context, as well as the materials and techniques available during that period. By understanding architecture more broadly, a production process that goes beyond the resulting and socially experienced space, it is possible to reflect on how virtual instruments need to be more a tool than a means, adding to the evolution of the built and inhabited environment.
