On the one hand, architecture deals in the configuration of spaces by the expert

assembly of materials. Such functional assemblies for Le Corbusier constitute

‘the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light’

(Corbusier, 1931, p. 29). Architects define, order and build spaces. On the other

hand, there seem to be spaces that lie outside the tangible, material and

buildable that are of no less interest to architects. The advent of computerisation

has made architects even more aware of such ‘other spaces’. The enthusiasm

for cyberspace in the 1990s fuelled the fantasy of fully immersive environments

that seem in so many ways to exhibit the properties of the spaces we ordinarily

inhabit, but exist only as data in computer memory and networks. In a book

Technoromanticism (1999) I examined the legacies that promoted cyberspace

and the speculations advanced by many enthusiasts that digital networks augur

a new future in which human beings become absorbed into a great mind-meld,

a new container of everything, the fusion of information, knowledge, time,

space and identity. In that book I argued that this cyberspace dream (or

nightmare) alludes to Platonic idealism, or at least it presents a post-industrial-

age, highly technologised, neo-romantic idealism. Cyberspace is an attempt to

create and grasp the immaterial in architecture.