Internet and Architecture

The Internet is fundamentally changing how we practice some of our most basic everyday activities, and challenging how we perceive and use architectural space. Yet the nature of these information-driven changes and their desirability for architecture and society is hotly contested. This course provides a basic orientation to these fundamental changes and the implications of new Internet-based concepts, such as online identity, personalization, open source, peer-to-peer networks, virtual communities, cyberspace, on the architecture of buildings and vice versa. It explores the possibility of a new architecture that converges the physical and virtual by focusing on two tightly interconnected topics: (1) information architecture: the application of architectural concepts like spatial configuration, proportional systems, circulation, scale and texture to the design of virtual space, and (2) architecture as interface: examining the possibility of physical architecture and architectural elements, such as walls, ceilings, floors, doors and furniture to act as elements of connectivity and mediate between the virtual world and everyday physical activity. The seminar consists of lectures, discussions, software workshop, demos, and a final project in which new designs of physical/virtual architecture will be developed and prototyped.