A recent strand of architecture responds to the digital age, what Charles Jencks calls the information explosion. The most celebrated example is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilboa, Spain [Fig. 1]. Frank Gehry worked primarily in Southern California. This has shiny, metallic surfaces treated in a plastic way, with an interpenetration of voids and volumes. It consists of imaginative organic shapes. Advanced computer modelling was used to generate the designs and ensure that there were no flat planes, straight lines or right angles in the entire structure.
Fig. 1 Guggenheim Museum, Bilboa, Spain
The distorted planes and angles give a changeable, protean form. This cube is coated with a prismatic material, meaning that it changes colour in relation to lighting conditions and the position of the viewer [Fig. 2]. Inside the cube there is an animate space which looks like a digital environment [Fig. 3].
Fig. 2 Guggenheim Museum, Bilboa, Spain
Fig. 3 Guggenheim Museum, Bilboa, Spain
This even led to architecture that is purely digital. The virtual New York Stock Exchange was designed by Asymptote (1998). It's a virtual reality environment - a fully navigable space existing in real time [Fig. 4]. It allows traders to interact in a simulated space, so it facilitates international commerce. Architects are accepting globalisation as a reality.
Fig. 4 Virtual New York Stock Exchange
This is a project called Personal Billboard, designed by Didier Faustino [Fig. 5]. It's a private house fitted with huge external screens that show video footage of the occupants. According to the architect it blurs the boundaries between public and private, and also mixes exhibitionism with voyeurism. It can be seen as an attempt to personalise the built environment. It allows the occupants to project themselves onto urban space and become part of it.
Fig. 5 Personal Billboard
