Fredrik Hellberg and Lara Lesmes of Space Popular reflect on a role for architects in shaping virtual environments
AT How did you get interested in virtual reality as an architectural subject?
Fredrik Hellberg Since we were students about 12 years ago we have been interested in the capacity of architecture free from physical constraints. We did a lot of speculative projects, essentially about virtual space, but before commercially available VR existed. When it did become available, around 2014, we started to explore it with students. In the last few years we’ve put almost all of our energy – when it comes to thinking about what virtual architecture could be – into spaces to interact with other humans.
Lara Lesmes We think of virtual spaces in the same way as sixteenth-century frescoes; you are creating spaces that are experienced half through the imagination. In both cases architectural design is serving a purely experiential purpose – it’s not providing shelter, or tackling the practical problems that architecture usually solves in the physical world. So your only design criteria is the kind of experience you want to create.
Establishing an intellectual framework for the problem-solving aspect of making physical buildings is perhaps easier: you can say “I’m going to work with these types of materials”, or “I’m going to make it as simple and affordable as possible”. But very seldom as architects do we talk about the criteria beyond problem-solving. That’s why we think the virtual shines a positive light on architecture – on the skill of the architect in shaping spatial experiences.
Below: ‘The Wardian Case’, a 2019 installation by Space Popular in the tapestry rooms at Palazzo Reale Milano, created as part of the exhibition DE/CODING.
AT As an architectural activity, is VR perceived as being distinct from and lesser than designing physical buildings?
FH It is interesting to think about how integrated media already is in architecture – not just in the tools which have all completely absorbed as a way to produce architecture, but also the use of media in buildings. You rarely hear someone saying “This is a media-free building, we’re not installing ways to connect a television”. That will be also be true of this new medium, which will soon replace screens.
LL Some people within the discipline of architecture may feel slightly threatened by the availability of virtual worlds, and the tools to create them. The fear is that maybe it’s less necessary to have architects because in the virtual world everyone can create space. However we think that people attempting to create spaces will immediately realise how hard it is, and that it requires a particular way of thinking and a lot of training, which is the skill of the architect.
Installation and VR view of Space Popular’s 2020 exhibition ‘Freestyle: Architectural Adventures in Mass Media’, in RIBA’s Architecture Gallery. The exhibition can be explored in online VR via architecture.com.
FH At our RIBA show ‘Freestyle’ we taught school students how to create virtual worlds in which people could meet and interact online. They had no architectural or game-making experience, but after a two-hour workshop they created full-on worlds, full of buildings and objects. It’s possible that the next 50 years might see radical changes to the 150-year streak that architects have had of being professionally institutionalised.
LL The discipline will open up rather than disappear. When people come to create those virtual worlds, they need to talk about the issues with them, and to look at architectural precedents – how have people made environments over centuries? What have we learned? Then you realise the power of the discipline, of coming together constantly to talk about the qualities of space.
We might look back at the way the city looks now as being dystopic – when all of these facades were just whatever one architect happened to decide one morning 60 years ago”
AT Is there a generational divide in the way people see the reality of the virtual?
LL Because younger people tend to be more involved with gaming, they’ve integrated that technology into their lives and social relationships, but even older generations don’t think of Whatsapp or Facebook as a separate world to the physical one. If anyone of any age starts using a platform in a way that creates meaningful relationships, then the divide between worlds will be blurred and disappear: it’s one complex reality, not separate realities.
For ‘Value in the Virtual’, a 2018 exhibition at ArkDes in Stockholm, Space Popular created an immersive installation exploring the role of architecture, and architects, in the design of virtual worlds.
AT Does the ability to ‘overwrite’ physical spaces with a virtual layer change the idea of authorship in architecture – and might that change the role of the architect?
FH In the next 15 years or so, most people will have access to a virtual layer, outside in the city, so every surface you can see or perceive has the potential to be alive. This is often characterised as a nightmare – the QR code city, where the physical city is just a dead body to take on this virtual content.
How you view it depends on where the value of the things you perceive is. In our 2018 exhibition ‘Value in the Virtual’ in Stockholm, we highlighted what we thought the values of physical architecture are, and which of those transfer into the virtual. It’s only really the non-quantifiable ones: comfort, aesthetics and meaning. Those are also the ones that we somehow deep-down care about, as long as our bodies are protected from the weather.
This virtual layer might be personalised to some extent, and has the potential to be infinitely meaningful to people that live in a city. It’s possible that we might look back at the way the city looks now as being the dystopic version, when all of its facades were unreachable – just whatever one architect happened to decide on a Tuesday morning 60 years ago, which is what we all have to live with for ever. If real meaning is in that virtual layer, that can change and update with our beliefs and views. We could see it as much more interesting and utopic to live in a city that is more meaningful.
LL One of the most eye-opening pieces of work I’ve seen is by one of our students who made a 3D model of the Sistine Chapel, and then showed it with and without the paintings. It is the ultimate media building. It’s a box, that by its augmentation through virtual means – a micron of paint – becomes a completely different space. So what is the architecture there?
What that points towards is that there will be more specific attention towards what appeals to the different senses. The visual experience of architecture is one thing, and the haptic experience is another, because you still can’t sit on a chair made of pixels. What we consider is or is not architecture will be detached from the idea that architecture is bricks and mortar. It’s also what is painted on the bricks.
Space Popular’s installation ‘The Venn Room’ at the 2019 Tallinn Architecture Biennale used VR to explore how digital environments will integrate and overlap with domestic environments.
AT For society, the digital revolution may be as significant as the industrial one, As the digital world maps directly onto the physical, should we anticipate fundamental change in the discipline of architecture?
FH When the content of our computers and our digital life becomes three-dimensional, and draped over the physical world, we will laugh at the time people moved through cities clutching their phones, trying to walk and still be in screen-world. If the screen is wherever your eyes touch, then your digital life – your connection with friends – becomes part of the architecture. There is a role for someone who thinks about how we interact with that city, whether that is the architect or not.
LL One of the things we tried to show with ‘Freestyle’ is that while the changes we see look fundamental, when you see change over a much larger time-frame, it falls within recognisable patterns. So we’d be a bit wary of claiming a fundamental change. The shift to digital is maybe on a par with the introduction of electricity, but it is also as important as mixing pigments with egg, so that paintings can last for ever.
FH History also shows a pattern of revivals or reactions in response to technological change; the Arts & Crafts followed the industrial revolution. So we will also see better physical buildings, in terms of conventional concerns in architecture, arising from this great move into the virtual.
