A Realist Conception of Architecture in the Metaverse
Patrik Schumacher, London 2022
Published in: Vahid Vahdat & James F. Korestes (eds), Architecture, Film and the In-between – Spatio-Cinematic Betwixt, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2023
Abstract:
Spatiology, phenomenology, semiology and dramaturgy identify and define central aspects of architecture’s task domain. These aspects of architectural learning respond to key challenges contemporary architecture faces with respect to its need to adapt its intelligence and design resources to the density, complexity and dynamism of 21st century social life. Architectural design shares these challenges with film making. Here too spatiological, phenomenological, semiological and dramaturgical intelligence is in demand and has been theoretically reflected. An engagement with the art and theory of film making in order to hunt for a potentially productive transfers of design intelligence makes sense, e.g. in terms of techniques of observer-dependent spatial framing, especially as architecture gears up to the design of virtual spaces, cities and worlds: the metaverse. It is in this context of cyberspace and metaverse design that the task dimensions of spatiology, phenomenology, semiology and dramaturgy as key dimensions of a spatial UI/UX design effort are foregrounded and distilled as indispensable competencies. Here too architecture must cope with increasing levels of social communicative density, complexity and dynamism. As physical construction constraints disappear, spatial cognition, information density and interaction richness come to the fore as the critical performance criteria of all design. The focus on those problems that are most typical of our current times of transition and on opportunities grounded in nascent social, economic and technological conditions aligns the author’s real and virtual (metaverse) architectural ambitions with the spirit of realism in film and fiction.
Keywords: spatiology, phenomenology, semiology, dramaturgy, organisation, articulation, signification, interaction, communication, societal function, framing, realism, metaverse
The Totality of the Human Phenomenal World
Architecture, together with the other design disciplines, can claim universal competency and exclusive responsibility for the totality of the designed environment and world of artefacts, both real and virtual, i.e. for the totality of the human phenomenal world. Everything that surrounds us, meets our senses and as interface mediates our communications with the social world was designed by a colleague. The design disciplines include: urban design, landscape design, architecture, interior design, furniture design, fashion design, product design, as well as graphic design and web-design, and in the near future: metaverse design. All the design disciplines together form a single discourse and function system of society with the shared societal function of the spatio-visual framing of all communicative interactions. This discourse revolves around the lead distinction of form (internal reference) versus function (external reference), is structured by the persistent binary code of (formally and functionally) ‘resolved’ versus ‘unresolved’. The criteria for the concrete application of these code values is being programmed and re-programmed by the design disciplines’ (or the designer’s) historically evolving (adapting) style. To the extent that all designers are plugged into and respond to the global design discourse, this discourse is omnipotent with respect to the spatio-visual and tactile shaping of the phenomenal world, within the economic constraints and social functionality expectations set by (private or public) clients.
The designed spatio-visual frames are themselves communications. All design is communication design. Social life attributes these framing communications to the clients who are the hosts of all communicative interaction events, not to the designers. Within the design discourse however, they are attributed to the designers or design teams as their authors. Designs and the design processes are embedded in the global specialized design discourse demanding explanations and arguments, guided by architectural/design theory.[i]
The design task of the communicative spatio-visual framing of the societal life process must draw on four distinct but interrelated domains of expertise with their respective subtasks as follows:
- spatiology: organisation
- phenomenology: articulation
- semiology: signification
- dramaturgy: interaction
‘Spatiology’ is concerned with spatial organisation and plots out the geometric premises, sets the scene as it were, for the other three agendas of phenomenology, semiology and dramaturgy. Spatiology guides the distribution of places in space with respect to distancing, adjacencies and connections. To the extent that the film making involves set design and the selection of locations, spatiology is also a dimension of film making. The task dimension involves the selection of strategies of spatial organisation like axial ordering, grids, stacking, nesting, overlapping etc.
‘Phenomenology’, as understood in this essay (and in the author’s theory of architecture in general), is concerned with morphological articulation and addresses the problem of the perceptual tractability of complex spatial/social scenes, i.e. the task of maintaining legibility in the face of complexity. The psychology of perception is a key resource with respect to this task.
‘Semiology’ is concerned with communication via signification. The meaning of spaces and designs coincides with the social interactions they frame, i.e. meaning is or anticipates use. The semiological project sets out the task of increasing the information-richness of the built environment by means of crafting a spatio-visual language or system of signification that is empowered by the combinatorial potency of grammar. Here linguistics serves as a fertile source domain for conceptual inspiration.
‘Dramaturgy’ is concerned with patterns and potentials of interaction. In the context of architecture, and in the context of designing for the metaverse understood as a spatial immersive world wide web, dramaturgy is closely related to what in web-design is pursued under the heading of interaction design. Dramaturgy implies environmental action in the time dimension, i.e. the design of a built environment, real or virtual, that is both kinetically responsive to user interaction as well as spontaneously engaging users.
These are the four task dimensions of any architectural design project. It is significant that the related domains of expertise and the respectively related intellectual disciplines have also been reflected and employed within film theory, as resources to address respectively related problems and ambitions.
Genealogy of an Insight and Project
The author started to think about the relationship between architecture and film making in the late 1990s, in the context of the design research programme ‘Responsive Environments’ at the AADRL, the Design Research Lab at the Architectural Association. Responsive environments are inherently 4D designs. The idea of responsiveness implies that architectural elements respond to or engage with human agents entering the scene. This necessitates that the human agents and their actions, i.e. the social life process, has to be simulated within the architectural model. The ambition quickly expanded from the illustrative animation of isolated interactions between human and architectural agents to the orchestration of elaborate social event scenarios unfolding over several stages of transformation, showing the capacity of the responsive/spontaneous environment to facilitate an unfolding event dynamic that shifted between different social situation to achieve an overall diversity of complementary communicative scenarios. The examples we elaborated were conferences and workshops, as well as social networking gatherings. Such a gathering must provide not only a high number of encounters and conversations but must also maximize the range of types of communications: Many quick greetings, short conversations, in depth one-to-one conversations, in-depth conversations in small groups, larger fluid groups, as well as moments where everybody, the whole party, comes together for a shared experience etc. An event that produces only a thousand quick greetings and nothing else is as dissatisfying and dysfunctional as getting stuck with a single conversation partner for the whole evening. The spatial organisation, its richness of differentiation, as well as the dramaturgy of the interaction dynamics supplied by the architectural agents, can make or break the overall success of the event.
It became clear that the understanding and testing of the design proposals would ideally take the form of mini-movies enacting and playing out the event scenarios envisioned by the designer and called for by the imagined event host and client. It also became clear that – although the idea of kinetic responsiveness had triggered the investment into scenario animations – the point of scenario thinking and the simulation of the social communication processes that were meant to be facilitated by the architectural design – was equally pertinent with respect to static environments. Further, we had started to understand the responsive or spontaneous kinetic transformations of the architectural agents, for instance the opening of a door or the rotation of a chair, as gestures and invitations addressed to human agents, i.e. as communications. We then realized that a passive door or chair are equally functioning as invitations, are also communications in their simple presence. It became clear that the whole built environment was a field of gestures, an array of communications, each functioning as framing premise and definition of the social situation that would or could unfold if the architectural invitation was taken up by human agents. The built environment is like a text, a permanent broadcast.
Framing in Architecture and Cinema
In the author’s general theory of architecture[ii] this insight is expressed in the general formula that the societal function of architecture is the ‘framing of communicative interactions’ and that these frames, static or dynamic, are themselves communications that function as premise and broad situational definition for the communications that can then unfold within this frame. If this focus on the social functionality of the built environment defines architecture in demarcation from the engineering disciplines, and if this framing process becomes increasingly complex and non-trivial, beyond simple stereotypes, then it follows that a design model can only truly be an architectural model if it models the social interaction process together with the architectural agents that are meant to facilitate and shape it. It is also implied here that architectural semiology is an essential ingredient of our discipline’s core competency.
The concept of frame and (spatio-visual) framing is central to the author’s theory of architecture, as it self-locates within Niklas Luhmann’s theory of modern/contemporary society as functionally differentiated society. The concept enters into the formula that defines the societal function of architecture and the design disciplines, namely ‘the communicative framing of social communication’, a formula that explains and justifies the differentiation of design as an autonomous function system. This function of framing is essential for all communications because all communication presupposes that there exists a prior definition of the situation. Only if the social situation is specified (as a selection from the daunting multiplicity of different potential situations that overall society allows for) can encounters be converted into occasions for communication. Luhmann, building in this respect on Parsons, talks about the need to break the indeterminacy of encounters that emerges from the inherent double contingency of every encounter between free agents. On this basis the author draws the conclusion that this exigency and functional necessity of all societies, and especially in the case of large scale, anonymous societies, provides the basis for the differentiation and distillation of architecture and the design disciplines as function system, profession and discourse. This also firmly establishes the semiological project at the heart of the design disciplines, whether pursued only intuitively or consciously and theory-led. Indeed, all societal communication situations are framed by means of design, and this includes the graphic design of the book you are reading now. This too offers a semantic spatio-visual framing and nuanced definition/anticipation of the possible character of the content of the printed communication. Luhmann himself did not see or describe this function system of design. The author thus had to look elsewhere for a pertinent term. A viable point of connection was found in Erwing Goffman’s ‘Frame Analysis’[iii], although Goffman’s concept of frame is more abstract and general, in the sense of setting, context or situation, implying a script, i.e. rules/protocols of interaction that govern a social event. This seemed like a very good match and terminological move: The architectural frame informs about the social framing, the visible informs about and anticipates the invisible, space denotes script.
There is also a significant, at least non-arbitrary, connection between this concept of architectural frames with the concepts of frames and framing in cinema and film theory. This connection can be brought out via Gilles Deleuze’s writings on film. Framing received its own chapter in Deleuze’s 1983 book ‘Cinema I’. Here Deleuze defines ‘framing’ as follows:
“We will call the determination of a closed system, a relatively closed system which includes everything which is present in the image – sets, characters and props – framing. The frame therefore forms a set which has a great number of parts, that is of elements, which themselves form subsets.”[iv] Deleuze notes that frames are differentiated in adaptation to social content, for instance “individuals are not framed in the same way as crowds”.[v]
Deleuze seems to be interested in the complexity of what can be contained within a cinematic frame. He talks about the possibility of saturation. This coincides with the author’s problematic of coping with complexity and delivering information-richness as well as interaction-richness. Deleuze emphasizes the big screen and the ‘depth of field’.
“The big screen and depth of field in particular have allowed the multiplication of independent data, to the point where a secondary scene appears in the foreground while the main one happens in the background (Wyler), or where you can no longer even distinguish between the principal and the secondary (Altman).”[vi] Deleuze’s account emphasizes that filmic frames, like architectural frames, allow for nesting so that “there are many different frames in the frame. Doors, windows, box office windows, skylights, car windows, mirrors, are all frames in frames. The great directors have particular affinities with particular secondary, tertiary, etc. frames. And it is by this dovetailing of frames that the parts of the set or of the closed system are separated, but also converge and are reunited.”[vii]
Deleuze is also interpreting the visual given semiologically: “the frame teaches us that the image is not just given to be seen. It is legible as well as visible.”[viii]
In Deleuze’s account framing is not only marking out the scene but is also involved with dramaturgy: “Sometimes the frame is conceived as a dynamic construction in act [en acte], which is closely linked to the scene, the image, the characters and the objects which fill it. The iris method in Griffith, which isolates a face first of all, then opens and shows the surroundings; Eisenstein’s researches inspired by Japanese drawing, which adapt the frame to the theme; Gance’s variable screen which opens and closes ‘according to the dramatic necessities’, and like a ‘visual accordion’ – from the very beginning attempts were made to test dynamic variations of the frame. In any case framing is limitation.”[ix]
It also seems as if major film directors used architectural ordering tropes to make their complex (opening) scenes legible, echoing the architects’ phenomenologically instrumental compositional stance: “Eisenstein studied the effects of the golden section on cinematographic imagery; Dreyer explored horizontals and verticals, symmetries, the high and the low, alternations of black and white; the Expressionists developed diagonals and counter-diagonals, diagonals, pyramidal or triangular figures which agglomerate bodies, crowds, places, the collision of these masses, a whole paving of the frame ‘which takes on a form like the black and white squares of a chess-board’ (Lang’s The Nibelungen and Metropolis). Even light is the subject of a geometrical optic, when it is organised with shadows into two halves, or into alternating rays, as is done by one Expressionist tendency (Wiene, Lang).”[x]
Cinema must recreate and make legible a spatio-social setting consisting of a non-arbitrary set of parts. Deleuze speaks of closed systems (reminiscent of Luhmann’s notion of self-referentially closed social systems) that might further subdivide or are revealed to be a subsystem of an encompassing system. This description indirectly correlates the cinematic framing with the way social situations are differentiated and integrated into systems of situations, and how this is reflected in the spatial order of nesting and subdivision. “The divisibility of content means that the parts belong to various sets, which constantly subdivide into sub-sets or are themselves the sub-set of a larger set, on to infinity. This is why content is defined both by the tendency to constitute closed systems and by the fact that this tendency never reaches completion. Every closed system also communicates.”[xi]
Cinematic frames are related to observer positions within the set of parts or reveal an encompassing set. Deleuze insists that angles of framing, i.e. points of view, must make pragmatic sense within the structure of participant positions. “The frame is related to an angle of framing. This is because the closed set is itself an optical system which refers to a point of view on the set of parts. Of course, the point of view can be – or appear to be – bizarre or paradoxical: the cinema shows extraordinary points of view – at ground level, or from high to low, from low to high, etc. But they seem to be subject to a pragmatic rule which is not just valid for the narrative cinema: to avoid falling into an empty aestheticism they must be explained, they must be revealed as normal and regular – either from the point of view of a more comprehensive set which includes the first, or from the point of view of an initially unseen, not given, element of the first set.”[xii]
It becomes clear that the legibility of the set must be ascertained for all or several possible observer positions. This is a key aspect of the phenomenological project, especially in the context of complex scenes involving multiple participant positions and audiences.
Architecture as UX/UI Design
In recent months the author has increasingly felt compelled to refer to dramaturgy as another key ingredient of our discipline’s competency. The context for this is the engagement with the design of virtual communication spaces. In this context it makes sense to interpret the architect’s task as UI/UX design. This concept of an interface design and interaction/experience design can be generalized across all architectural design. All architecture and design is UX/UI design, involving organisation (spatiology), articulation (phenomenology), signification (semiology) and interaction design (dramaturgy).
In the realm of virtual environment design the desire for actively self-transforming communicative architectural frames is much easier to realise. On this count dramaturgy will be much more foregrounded in the metaverse than it ever was in the context of physical architecture. More generally, matters of communication and communicative framing, dynamic or static, are much more distilled here as the essential function of all design.
Reflecting back now on the earlier design explorations within AADRL, it becomes clear that dramaturgy also played a role with respect to understanding and visualising static environments, in as much as the dramaturgical imagination encompasses both architectural and human agents. The designer must develop a film maker’s dramaturgical imagination, aided by the life process simulation capacity we find in game engines like Unity and Unreal. The scenarios architects are here called upon to elaborate and visualize are obviously not full feature films. They are rather like single scenes or episodes of a movie, not whole movies. Their plot is the plot of a social communication event. But then again, there are many such event plots to be considered when designing for large organisations like universities or corporate headquarters.
Complex scenes and unfolding event scenarios can be studied via a totalising top view. One might also productively use the tool of time compression (acceleration) to gain a perspective on temporally stretched out dynamics. However, the exploration of first-person perspective “filming” is also important to gage the participants’ perceptual experience and the scene’s perceptual tractability from within. This is where the phenomenological project comes in, problematizing navigation, orientation, and perceptual grasp. These are also issues with which film makers must grapple, with respect to their audience’s spatial orientation, with respect to the legibility of a space or scene. The analogy with film making also reminds us of the fact that the experience of a complex space is always fragmentary and must be mentally synthesized from a sequence of partial experiences.
A successful dramaturgical project presupposes a successful semiological project. Social situations must be identified and deciphered before they can be activated. With respect to developing the semiological project it is important to elaborate typical social scenarios that play upon a differentiated, ordered manifold of distinctive settings, and nuanced variants. From the point of view of architecture’s societal function society can be understood as an expansive, richly differentiated, ordered and connected array of social situations, each with its own interaction protocols and non-arbitrary set of relevant participants. These situations or specific communicative event-types are recognisable by means of both spatial (positional) and morphological markers as identifiers so that the relevant participants and contributors to the event can find each other and congregate into a pertinent interaction configuration. The social meanings the various settings and places acquire are the result of a process of spontaneous semiosis. This might be the spontaneity of an instant discovery of a use potential. Mostly, however, one-time discoveries are as quickly forgotten and lost, so that ‘spontaneous’ (unplanned) semiosis is a slow, gradual process of mutation, selection and reproduction. This can only be very broadly anticipated and pre-determined by the client’s designations, especially in a world where, like in contemporary business organisations, the tendency for more self-directness and self-organisation finds its echo in so called ‘agile’, ‘activity based’ or ‘non-territorial’ work environments. The autocatalytic, path-dependent character of semiosis, whereby selection pressures work on but cannot determine initial spontaneous uses (mutations), implies that the outcome of the bootstrapping of meaning cannot be controlled or precisely predicted. Hower, broad pattern prediction is possible. In any event, the semiologically informed design can offer a more intricately spatialised, better articulated, more systematically encoded semantic matrix of places for social self-sorting, albeit without being able to guarantee that the intended meanings come to be realized in the actual life process. The semiological project offers a (potentially grammar empowered) spatio-visual system of significations as catalyst for a spontaneous social semiosis. However, even if the meanings that the various places, zones, positions and morphological features acquire are rather different from those intended, the designed spatio-morphological structure will serve this new meaning ensemble as orienting text. The ambition of the semiological project is to give this meaning receptacle a more intricate and nuanced structure thereby increasing its potential information-richness and interaction-richness.
A successful semiological project presupposes a successful phenomenological project. Semantically codified spatio-morpholoical signs must become perceptually conspicuous and recognisable before they can trigger semantic associations, before they can be deciphered or become significant. Complex configurations might require compositional clarification before they become perceptually tractable. Also, the perceptual legibility of a complex ensemble or space will be different from different perspectives, as any photographer and any designer who is setting up renderings knows. The same problematic is faced in movies, perhaps more acutely, due to the imposition of fitting complex narratives into 90 minutes. The movement of the camera, like the scanning glance in real world orientation situations, can powerfully support the perceptual grasp of a complex scene. It aids 360 degree comprehension as well as depth comprehension. The crafting of vistas and sequences of vistas is an art and effort that has long since been pursued in architecture and urban design, as well as in cinema.
Realism in Architecture, Cinema and Metaverse
One way to work on and explore this intended layer of meaning is by operationalising it within the architectural model via agent-based life-process simulations.[xiii] (This is being explored via the research agenda of ‘agent-based parametric semiology’, pursued by a PhD group coached by the author as well as by a dedicated R&D team within Zaha Hadid Architects.) Here agents are equipped with decision algorithms based on utility functions that mediate local information about action opportunities with multiple goals and their respective urgency based on internal states in dependence of the cumulative simulation history. Global interaction patterns emerge from heterogenous agent populations interacting within semantically charged environments.
Another, very different but complementary way would be to develop a method of fictional scenario writing that takes its lesson from (the theory of) the realist novel, aiming to make the typical tangible. Realism in its attempt to capture the historically typical is here – in accordance with Georg Lukacs’ literary theory[xiv] – distinguished from (the seemingly similar) naturalism with its indiscriminate depiction of idiosyncratic individual detail. To be sure, realism is also sharply distinguished from all nostalgia, as well as from all utopian escapism.
Realism is historically grounded and situated, and this means bound to contemporary social and technological conditions, possibly extrapolated into the near future.
This realist architectural scenario writing would involve the description of typical event scenarios and typical interaction dynamics in the context of assumed typical goals, i.e. the goals of individual actors and the goals of the host institution. The scenario descriptions would relate the social scenarios to the spatial settings and reveal the semantic encoding of settings with reference to both their formal features and their associated messaging, including connotations and anticipations. The description would switch between overview accounts and first-person experiential accounts, taking up the perspective of multiple participants, each with his/her own agenda. Realism demands the recognition that participants (for instance employees) and hosts (for instance the corporation) pursue agendas that do not necessarily coincide or dovetail with the brief’s ideal intentions.
The “novel” would also reveal that each participant type comes with its particular partial sensitivity to the meanings broadcast within the space, as well as with its particular interpretation of these meanings, attuned to the agenda being pursued. This polycontexturality is something to be reckoned with and built into the design of the semiological system. It does not undermine the system’s social functionality, as long as these interpretations are complementary in that they make social cooperation possible despite their divergent underlying agendas. Unity of agenda and motivation does not have to be presupposed.
From here it easy to imagine that a scenario animation using the repertoire of cinematic narration would be a valuable tool to investigate and home in on the social performance ambitions of the design and to verify the design’s potential to facilitate social life. Sketchy attempts towards this have been a tradition at the AADRL for many years. To this extent architects take up the mantle of film makers. These sketches, even as academic avant-garde efforts, indeed precisely as academic avant-garde projects, were always eminently realistic in their ambition, in Lukacs’ sense of striving for historical typicality, geared to the progressive aspects of the contemporary conditions and potentials on the near historical horizon. The task was and is to distil the challenges and opportunities of our computationally empowered post-fordist network society.
Although film theory has used semiology to reflect and develop film making’s own language of narration, it is clear that a film maker must reckon and work with architectural systems of signification and design semiology in general. Deleuze’s account of film, especially of films operating under the paradigm of Realism, recognizes the importance and power of the spatio-social setting in which a depicted (narrated) social action is contextualized. According to Deleuze in realist cinema “milieux assert their independence”[xv] and actions are “actualised directly in determinate, geographical, historical and social space-times”[xvi].
Deleuze even defines realism via the determinate relationship between milieux and modes of behaviour. “What constitutes realism is simply this: milieux and modes of behaviour, milieux which actualise and modes of behaviour which embody.”[xvii] To be sure, the concept of milieu is broader than the spatial environment. It refers to the social setting. However, in film, just like in life, only heightened, it is the furnished spatial setting and the artefact/’fashion’ setting that informs, as indexical and/or symbolic sign, about the social setting and situation.
“The milieu always actualises several qualities and powers. It carries out a global synthesis of them, it is itself the Ambiance or the Encompasser [Englobant], whilst the qualities and the powers have become forces in the milieu. The milieu and its forces incurve on themselves, they act on the character, throw him a challenge, and constitute a situation in which he is caught. The character reacts in his turn (action properly speaking) so as to respond to the situation.”[xviii] The human agent “must acquire a new mode of being (habitus) or raise his mode of being to the demands of the milieu and of the situation.”[xix]
Reality is determinate, is making demands, delivers resistance and constraints, requires adaptations. Historical reality poses problems, but it also delivers the concrete resources from which to craft innovative solutions. Innovative architecture has often cherished constraints as engines of invention. Real invention is very different from flights of fancy. Deleuze is certainly describing realism as grounded in historical contexts, as the opposite of untethered, high flying imagination. The determinate and determinative milieu is opposed to the ‘any-space-whatevers’: “The realism of the action-image is opposed to the idealism of the affection-image. … the former is developed in the Any-Space-Whatevers/Affects pair. The second will be developed in the Determined Milieux/Modes of Behaviour pair.”[xx]
Deleuze argues that there is a two-way indexicality. If the situation determines (or at least constraints) the action, then the situation can be inferred from the action. Deleuze distinguishes two cinematic movements that essentially both express the dependency between action and situation. The move from situation to action to (modified) situation (SAS), and the move from action to situation leading to further action (ASA). He calls the former the large form and the latter the small form. “The large form – SAS’ – moved from the situation to the action, which modified the situation. But there is another form, which, on the contrary, moves from the action to the situation, towards a new action: ASA’. This time it is the action which discloses the situation, a fragment or an aspect of the situation, which triggers off a new action.”[xxi]
Deleuze explains that these small form action images communicate via indexical signs, in that the social situation can be inferred from the depicted action: “An action (or an equivalent of action, a simple gesture) discloses a situation which is not given. The situation is thus deduced from the action, by immediate inference, or by relatively complex reasoning.”[xxii] The situation might also be encapsulated and deduced from a fragment or part. This points to the fact that coherently designed settings – within which many items and features correlate in accordance with the laws of integral functionality – allow observers and potential participants to read the situation and make pertinent inferences. This facilitation of inferences is the pragmatic meaning of the information-richness that the semiological project aims to enhance. Parametricism, as well as its most advanced variant tectonism, even without explicitly embracing the semiological project, already embeds this inference facilitation capacity into its designs just through its methodology of weaving dense dependency networks. Everything communicates with everything else.
All the features of realism discussed above could (and should) be brought to bear on the design of metaverses. The metaverse the author envisages is not offering an escape into a parallel reality or second life, but is meant to empower productive, integral lives and enhance current social reality. It must be firmly grounded and situated within current social, economic, and technological conditions, and can play an important part in advancing these conditions, enhancing social productivity. Social actions and situations are correlates and each situation is framed – distinguished, localised, set up, connected and configured – by metaverse designers on behalf of clients/entrepreneurs who want to tap into the powerful productivity potentials of realistic virtual worlds.
Realism here also means problem orientation, to quote Georg Lukacs, to “pose questions” and to “always take the most burning problems of the community as starting point”[xxiii]. The most potent metaverse conceptions that are about to take off now will not only be realist, but also avant-gardist in spirit. They can and should focus on the typical problematics and nascent opportunities that arise from the current societal transitioning into the new condition of a truly global creative and competitive knowledge economy. This has nothing much in common with video games, nor with virtual play worlds for socialising with friends and family like Meta’s ‘Horizon’. The metaverse project the author is investing in has more affinity with the project of the realist novel (and indeed realist film) which in Georg Lukacs spirited words is projecting “the hidden fluctuations of society, the intrinsic laws governing its movements, its incipient trends, its invisible growth and its revolutionary upheavals.”[xxiv] The metaverse, conceived within this paradigm of realism, can indeed become a harbinger of revolution, not only in architecture but in all that architecture frames.
End.
[i] This article is an updated contribution to the architectural theory expounded in the author’s ‘Autopoiesis of Architecture’.
[ii] Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume 1, A New Framework for Architecture, John Wiley & Sons, London 2010 & The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume 2, A New Agenda for Architecture, John Wiley & Sons, London 2012
[iii] Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis – An Essay on the Organisation of Experience, Harper & Row, New York 1974
[iv] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I, Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 13
[v] Ibid. p15
[vi] Ibid. p.13
[vii] Ibid. p.15
[viii] Ibid. p.14
[ix] Ibid. p.14
[x] Ibid. p.15
[xi] Ibid.p17
[xii] Ibid. p.16
[xiii] For recent summaries see: Patrik Schumacher, Operationalising Architecture’s Core Competency – Agent-based Parametric Semiology, in: DC I/O 2020 , Design Computation Input/Output Conference: Algorithms, Cognitions, Cultures; also: Patrik Schumacher, From Intuition to Simulation, in ‘Posistions: Unfolding Architectural Endeauvors’, Edition Angewandte, Birkhaeuser, Basel 2020; also: Patrik Schumacher, Advancing Social Functionality via Agent Based Parametric Semiology, in: AD Parametricism 2.0 – Rethinking Architecture’s Agenda for the 21st Century, Editor: H. Castle, Guest-edited by Patrik Schumacher, AD Profile #240, March/April 2016
[xiv] Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism, Hillway Publishing 1950, republished by Merlin Press, London 1972
[xv] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I, Bloomsbury Publishing, p.145
[xvi] Ibid. p.145
[xvii] Ibid. p.145
[xviii] Ibid. p.146
[xix] Ibid. p.146
[xx] Ibid. p. 127
[xxi] Ibid. p. 164
[xxii] Ibid. p. 165
[xxiii] Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism, Hillway Publishing 1950, republished by Merlin Press, London 1972, p.12
[xxiv] Ibid. p.70