Realism & Disconnect

When Adolf Loos takes us into the woods and describes the mound resting in the form of a pyramid he proclaims, “This is architecture.”1 Virtual House, a competition submission from London-based Foreign Office Architects, transplants the viewer into Moussavi and Zaera-Polo’s 1997 version of the woods, or in this case, the virtual. At a time in the late 90’s when digital representation is rapidly taking over offices globally, we begin to see a shift in rendering techniques through these new digital tools, generating narratives and imagery once thought as unimaginable. The image in review posits a new level of realism through representation to both the architecture and environment, where the two are collapsing upon one another, while simultaneously positioned in tension. FOA’s Virtual House is used to challenge traditional notions of domesticity through the spatial phenomenology, blurring of inside and outside, front and back2, and the real and the disconnected. Which is to say, in architecture’s infinite quest to happily wed with nature the introduction of computation tools presents the act of image making with a new mistress- software that allows the architecture to disconnect and situate itself within the environment of its choosing, i.e. the virtual. The new architectural image chooses its time and place, and if it’s representing architecture or nature, signaling an end and a new beginning.

Spring 2020
Full text available upon request