Diploma Unit Two. Architectural Association School of Architecture

Tools for Architecture is a research unit based at the Architectural Association in London formed by a team of MArch AA Diploma students and lead by Space Popular directors Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg.

The Architecture of The Immersive City

 

Consider this, the spaces we occupy today consist of static, unchanging forms, leaving us to drone on in a built environment designed for us by an external force, devoid of our unique personalities, and our individual tastes. This is the very familiar built environment of the physical reality, dictated by the restrictions of cost, labour, and physics, the constraints which limit the architecture around us into something we must accept.

 

If however, we were to consider the emerging virtual built environment of the immersive internet, these constraints which restrict us begin to disappear. The architecture that surrounds us is no longer just an entity that provides us shelter from the perils of the outside world, but instead begins to inspire us. The architecture of the immersive internet is not restricted by labour, instead its heavily ornamented forms can be built with ease, and replicated with similar quickness, leaving us with the freedom of immense ornamentation that would be considered too costly to build in the physical reality. The architecture then becomes an extension of the self, a prosthetic, in an emerging world where it is not our surroundings which constrain us, but it is our individual personalities that begin to shape the spaces that surround us.