This is part of a series of short essays I’m writing for my architecture criticism class; our assignment was to blog in our own voices about architecture.

Last July, the German new media artist Aram Bartholl secured funding from Rhizome to begin building de_dust, a popular video game level, as a 1:1 scale model cast out of solid concrete. It would be a crime to paraphrase his concisely argued rationale, so I’ve pasted a large chunk of it here:

“Computer games differ from other mediums such as books, movies or TV, in that spatial cognition is a crucial aspect in computer games. To win a game the player needs to know the 3D game space very very well. Spatial recognition and remembrance is an important part of our human capability and has formed over millions of years by evolution. A place, house or space inscribes itself in our spatial memory. We can talk about the qualities of the same movies we watched or books we have read. Continue reading →

This is part of a series of short essays I’m writing for my architecture criticism class; our assignment was to blog in our own voices about architecture.

It may seem strange to write criticism on virtual architecture.

After all, “real” buildings are commitments to the future, the result of considering countless affordances offered by cost, materials, building codes, urban planning, stakeholders, history, land use, style, etc. Every single building must be built to remain for some period of time, and even the most fanciful and esoteric structures must provide some sort of roof or shelter. This very practical notion of building things for humans has grounded architecture as a discipline.

Virtual buildings have no such constraints. In a virtual world, coliseums can float like clouds, steel frames are purely cosmetic, and matter / energy are limited only by computing power and memory. So in a way, this virtual architecture is limited by money and time, just like anything “real.” Continue reading →