week six_article nine_blog nineteen

Paul Virillio_The Overexposed City

...architecture is an instrument of measure, a sum of knowledge capable of organizing society’s space and time by pitting us against the natural environment. This “geodesic” capacity of defining a unity of time and place for activities now enters into open conflict with the structural capacities of mass communication.
-Virillio

To adapt the infamous lyrics of Madonna, we are increasingly living in an immaterial world. The continuing advancement and evolution of technology (information, communication, transportation) serves to sever individual and cultural experience from previously held notions of space, place, geography, and time; redefining some, while rendering others obsolete. Seemingly, architecture and urbanism is presented with a paradoxical problem: how is architecture/urbanism, which is a material entity (made up of physical elements) to reconcile itself with that which is immaterial (information and communication technologies). Can architecture exist without a geophysical reality? Can there be such a thing as insubstantial architecture; architecture without substance? If so, what can it be used for, what is its ‘value’?

As a parallel question, what is the contemporary relationship between state of the art technology and architecture/urbanism? At the end of his discussion, Virillio writes “the metropolis is no longer anything but a ghostly landscape, the fossil of past societies for which technology was still closely associated with the visible transformations of substance; a visibility from which science has gradually turned us away.” If we understand there to be a disconnection, a growing divide between new technologies and their composition and the structure and organization of the physical world, are we to assume that architecture/urbanism will be surpassed and discarded as no longer useful in the face of these new technologies? Is architecture merely a respondent to technological advancements, reacting to, appropriating and adapting these as they emerge? If so, what happens if architecture no longer has a means by which to relate to new technologies? Or is this itself impossibility? Will architecture always be able to find a way to locate itself within the structural capacities and systems of the technological state of the art? Can we understand architecture itself to be a continuously evolving technology?