Second Life is an ongoing investigation into the role of architecture inside online communities, and how these conditions and particularities form a new internet-inspired architecture.
When you design buildings in these communities like Second Life and previously Active Worlds, by default you are blurring the boundaries between design and construction: Your design begins to be inhabited even before you are finished working on it, while there is no construction phase: What you design is already built, instantly realized.
When you design buildings in these communities like Second Life and previously Active Worlds, by default you are blurring the boundaries between design and construction: Your design begins to be inhabited even before you are finished working on it, while there is no construction phase: What you design is already built, instantly realized.
Building typologies are also redefined in Second Life because not all buildings translate well. Offices are not useful in, because simulating sitting on a computer is boring. The avatars tend to prefer “experience” buildings or fun places. A place where you test-drive cars can be interesting because driving a car gives you a new screen experience. Nightclubs are fun because you can animate your avatar to dance, and that transfers some idea of fun or pleasure to the human behind the avatar.
More than just blurring the boundaries between design and construction, these communities offer the architect the chance to interact with a new typology of client: Easily bored, he or she can just click away and never see your building again, if it does not manage to capture their very short attention and fickle interest.
To attract this new user and to keep them interested, a new architecture is need, one that is immediate, subconscious, metaphysical and pop, neen and inspiring.
This is the architecture they will look for when they leave their computers and exit onto First Life. Second Life is an ongoing investigation into all this and much more.
