In the last five years we have witnessed an enormous interest in the idea of the virtual, triggered by the increasing availability of advanced information technology. The capacity of this technology to model and simulate the behaviour and the perception of environments have raised enormous expectations about the possibilities of producing synthetic, virtual environments that will eventually replace reality in the forms we know it. But if this virtual fever is a very recent phenomenon associated to the development of information technology, the idea of the virtual is not new. Virtual comes from the latin virtus, which means "potential" or "force", and becomes actual once it is made effective, perceptible or operative. Deleuze explains that the actualisation of the virtual is not the same as the realisation of the possible. Where the realisation of the possible is a process of achievement, a development of an existing model, the actualisation of the virtual can never reach a state of closure. The virtual has always a multiplicity of possible actualisations, and is always the origin or the limit of a new lineage rather than the exhaustion of the possible. This aception of the term opens a whole new field of possibilities for the virtual, beyond its conventional meaning as the replacement to the real. The virtual in this sense must coexist, tamper with the real, rather than becoming its replacement. The virtual is an artifice that produces a whole new construction of nature, of the real.
This concept of the virtual as what unfolds potentials beyond the given identities of form, function and place is in many ways coincident with the idea we had in mind when we started the project of foa, four years ago, as a practice dedicated to explore the potentials that a foreign perspective of the real may be able to unfold, beyond the conventions that construct a given domain of reality. Foreign naiveness, clumsiness or even brutality may eventually become instruments of this form of the virtual that escapes from perfecting the convention and realising the possible, and break into new forms of constructing the real.
The "aesthetic of dissapearance" and the "precession of simulacra" have grown out of the possibilities produced by the emerging information technologies, proposing the virtual as the dissolution of the body and the space in this emerging virtual world of screens, images and connections. But rather than constructing a sophisticated surrogate of the real, we would be interested to open unprecedented forms of its physical and programmatic constructions, proliferate the real towards unexpected directions.
YOKOHAMA PROJECT, MODEL VIEW FROM THE TOP OF PIER MODEL VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM OF PIER
CG IMAGE OF ROOF PLAZA APRON PLAN TERMINAL PLAN CIVIC FACILITIES PLAN ROOF PLAZA PLAN It is obvious that information technology has been a very important tool in the development of our work, and in the achievement of the form of virtuality that we are talking about: not so much as a tool for the simulation of reality, but rather as a tool for "modelling", in the broad sense of the term. To make a "model" means to design a device that, in the absence of verified data about its behaviour, simulates a system. Information technology becomes in this way an ideal tool for the production of the virtual, not as the reproduction of the real. The computer not only allows us to mimic a pre-existing reality, but also to construct organisations and images that we had never seen before, and that we could have never seen -and therefore we could have never imagined- without its existence. "Idea" and "Image" were the same word in ancient Greece; in other words, we can only conceptualise what we can see. If the realisation of the possible is a matter of interpretation, or re-description of a given set of identities or organisations, the actualisation of the virtual can never operate by resemblance, and therefore it requires from tools that will allow us to see -and therefore to imagine, to conceptualise- what we have never seen before.
The visualisation and operation with numerical data on n-dimensional spaces available through information technology allows us to introduce other parameters in the architectural drawings, such as time, light, temperature, weight..., that we were not able to visualise previously, and to test the behaviour of a system under conditions that are not experimentally verified, to explore situations beyond the accumulated knowledge or experience that we have from urban or architectural systems. It is precisely this capacity to expand our perception to domains beyond our experiential knowledge, and to control and determine with incredible accuracy the processes of construction of the environment that make the computer an ideal instrument for the production of the virtual.
APPROACH TRAFFIC PLAZA FOR CRUISE TERMINAL ENTRY TO TERMINAL APRON BIFURCATION: APRON / DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL HALL DEPATURE AND ARRIVAL HALL BIFURCATION: CRUISE TERMINAL / PLAZA PLAZA AND VISITOR'S DECK ENTRY TO RESTAURANTS, SHOPPING SPACE BIFURCATION: CRUISE DECK / VISITOR'S DECK CRUISE DECK SHOPPING SPACE EAST ELEVATION LONGITUDINAL SECTION THROUGH CENTER LONGITUDINAL SECTION THROUGH WEST SIDE RAMPS
SALON OF CIVIC EXCHANGE AND RESTAURANTS SECTION TERMINAL SECTION (CENTER) SHOPPING SPACE DOMESTIC TERMINAL SECTION INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL SECTION ELEVATION TOWARD THE CITY ENTRY TO SALON OF CIVIC EXCHA PLAZA RESTAURANT SALON OF CIVIC EXCHANGE EXPLODED SURFACES MOCK-UP OF CARDBOARD STRUCTURE PUSAN PROJECT
VIEW OF HIGHRISE BUILDINGS AND ROOF PLAZA VIEW OF ROOF PLAZA VIEW OF CONCOURSE AERIAL VIEW VIEW OF PLATFORM VIRTUAL HOUSE PROJECT
AXIAL ELEVATION BASIC UNIT TRANSVERSAL SECTION BASIC UNIT (CENTER) TRANSVERSAL SECTION BASIC UNIT (SIDE) AXIAL ELEVATION BASIC UNIT ELEVATION BASIC UNIT MARTHA'S VINEYARD LOWER FLOOR PLAN BASIC UNIT UPPER FLOOR PLAN BASIC UNIT ROOFTOP PLAN BASIC UNIT
ROOFTOP VIEW ARIZONA MATTER HORN SCHWARZWALD SAHARA
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