ABSTRACT
Within the framework of environmental design, we are seeing, not a demand for a ‘truth to materials’, but for an understanding of a new truth about materials. The new concepts of embodied energy and life cycle analysis (see below) have given material production an ethical weight that is now environmental as well as social. This return to materiality within environmental architecture is at variance with what is perceived to be the increasing ‘etherealization’ of culture, the result of pervasive electronic mediation: through television, information technology, the Web and virtual reality. The effort on the part of architects like Peter Eisenman and commentators like Paul Virilio has been to understand how this new world of instant replay and disembodied access to any point on the planet is affecting our conceptualizing of time and space, and therefore of architecture:
What...becomes critical is not so much the three dimensions of space, but the fourth dimension of time – more precisely, the dimension of the present...[T]he new technologies are killing ‘present’ time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere, but the elsewhere of a ‘discreet telepresence’ that remains a complete mystery (Virilio, 1997: 10-11).
