ABSTRACT
The virtual world of the Internet has its architecture too: its intellectual structure of places (accessed with little sense of travel). But (for the moment, until the fantasy technology of the movie ‘The Matrix’ comes true) our only mode of interaction with it is through the mediating frame of the ubiquitous four-edged screen (computer, television, tablet, smartphone…). That parallel world is always on the other side of that window. But we still breathe, walk, eat, sleep… do those private things (go to the lavatory, make love…)… are born and die… here in what we call the ‘real’ world. This is the world where we feel the sun on our skins, smell the soft perfume of herbs as we brush past them, enjoy a cool breeze from an open window, experience a frisson as we cross a threshold, sense linkage with the remote when we stand on an axis, feel in harmony with the geometry of a room or garden, chat holding hands across a café table… These evoke just a few of the multifarious powers of the timeless metalanguage of architecture, the underpinning of our relationship with the physical (as well as the virtual) world.
