additional notes about the spatiality of information feeds
## previously
🌏 present
Architectural imagination changes when satellite images become everyday consumables. Learning from Las Vegas was possible because of them, but as they were not easy to acquire, what is produced is about architecture. More than buildings, the context they are in is discussed; therefore, the way we see them too changes. Architecture, therefore, extends and is seen as urban design, landscape architecture, and urban planning more in the 21st century than before. Cities change after Google Earth.
🌐 internet
There are only three sources that, before 2004, guide the manifestation of architecture: the architectural library, the architectural tour, and the masterworks. Networked digital and virtual spatial experiences are brand-new access. Sites you could not easily travel to now are modelled for your consumption. People who you never would have come across are but a comment away and connected almost 24/7 if they are comfortable with you. Social media is a new site of architectural discourse traditionally limited to books, lectures, and exhibitions.
🛰️ space
McKinsey and LSE’s Urban Age project can be credited to imagining the global city and, therefore, the city itself. This process is accelerated as data about the city is now easily organised and analysed, as cities are now seen from the skies above. For those who have missed it, Google Earth also comes with the layers of Sky, Mars, and Moon. Our glimpse of the planets and galaxies far away is almost the same as the city we live in. As with city datasets strewn across government and city administration portals, most of the space data to get an overview of the land is now a search away.
⌛ past
Conservation architecture in the country was possible as a significant stack of older buildings needed specialised repair. It requires the accommodation of present aspirations into a past. As imaging technology advances, our ability to see the past also augments. An entire published history of architecture, from the first set of 10 books to the latest, is now available online, either open access or through paid subscription services. Even the past of space is made possible by comparing the different images of it from several satellites orbiting around the Earth.
augmenting practices of imaginations of 🏛️ from the 🌏, on the 🌐, in 🛰️ and the ⌛
As imagination has changed, so has the creative spatial practice. Unlike in the recent past, there is no single reality but perspectives and points of view. Therefore, the body of architectural knowledge is not accessed by man as the centre of a building around him but in different landscapes and times. From a theorist, the architect is now a coder, a historian and even an astronaut. The question, thus, is, what is architectural imagination when there is no gravity? What are spatial speculations when land no longer has limits of a site?
