Published in Any n.19/20, 1997
The Virtual House1
Innovative and visionary architectures have been traditionally coupled with the invention of the future. But here we are not concerned with the future but with the virtual, as a source of new architectural possibilities. The idea of the future implies an expressed recognition of the discontinuity of time into fixed frames, as if the process of actualization of a certain reality was independent from a continuous process of change. This is the well-known distinction between diachronic time and synchronic time. The future, the past, the present are part of a static description of time into freeze-frames; alternatively, the virtual is able to capture the dynamic nature of a situation or an organization by extending the real toward the potentials and the memories that it contains. Synchronic time invokes both a very real and a very synthetic approach at once, given that to observe or critique forms of history or knowledge involves cutting sections through time and across times, to collect only apparently disconnected or isolated moments. The virtual house is just such a type of research into a form of inhabitation intended to unfold potentials beyond the given identities of form, function, and place. To literally produce or isolate the virtual is an improbable ambition, unless it is done through a mutable set of relationships 1. The Virtual House was a commission from the Anyone Corporation/FSB Brackel to explore the idea of the virtual in a domestic project. 284
Nomad Practices