Avatecture at UCLA Visualization Portal - 2000

[These notes were handed out for a presentation at MAK Day 2002 at the Rudolf Schindler House on Kings Road in Los Angeles.]

Quote from Rudolf Schindler's 1912 theoretical essay "Modern Architecture: A Program":

“Not the shaping of plastic form or massive materials, but the creation of space and room" - like the primitive hut - "a shelter that conveys space, climate, light, and mood" (p. 83 in Judith Sheine's R.M. Schindler)

Buildings are more than physical shapes or functional appliances. Schindler saw beyond form and function to buildings that are rooms, and Schindler’s rooms are spatial configurations of light, climate, and mood.
 

Today’s buildings also exist in information space. Buildings manifest their souls, what they are about, in cyberspace. Without a soul, a building exists as dead materiel that falls beneath 21st century dwelling. Without informational life, a building collapses into a collection of materials or isolated functions or merely private aesthetic experiences.


The 21st century is learning to build in information space. Buildings manifest their souls in cyberspace as virtual communities. Because buildings now enjoy informational life, their architecture transcends material and functional components and transcends Schindler’s rooms of physical light and local climate. Today’s buildings are transnational and they accommodate the phosphorescent glow of information screens and video projections.

A building in cyberspace becomes manifest as an avatar community that publicizes the soul of an institution. Each community is a performance community, with rituals that embed and project information in the physical structure. The community that inhabits a building expresses its inner activities and commercial behaviors through cyberspace proxies.

Avatars - real-time graphic presences - shape the physical structures by modifying the dynamic usages of buildings. Avatecture projects cyberspace identities within the physical structures and as physical structures manifest information, information in turn shapes physical structures. The Avatar Alcove is the feedback loop between virtual and physical spaces.

Cyberspace is performance space where graphically designed buildings host virtual communities that are intrinsically transnational. Many graphic virtual communities appear as real-time avatars. Avatar communities express the soul of an institution by creating performances that reveal the unique intentions of their physical structures. Avatars influence physical structure by conferring significance on materials and by dynamically modifying the arrangement of built structures.

Ancestors of the Avatar Alcove appear in Giotto's murals, in ancient and medieval statuary, and in the Renaissance piazzas.