About Virtual Cities
2024. 07. 11.
About seven years ago, I imagined that if I were to do a graduation project, I might start with a scenario where a meteor falls on a specific area of Seoul, vaporizing the city. When the land where the city was rooted disappears and the environment becomes uninhabitable, what would an architect create there? Since restoring the environment for urban reconstruction would clearly cost astronomical amounts, it would be difficult to immediately create habitable spaces for people to settle. Then, how about installing various servers and data storage that can operate even on devastated land, and creating a virtual space through these devices where people can gather? Surely people could gather and interact in this virtual space, and it could be a meaningful exercise to consider at what point, with how many people and what kind of interactions, we could start to think of this in terms corresponding to a real-world city. Couldn't it be a topic worth exploring in architecture to analyze how much resources are needed for the expansion and operation of these servers and storage - the physical embodiment of the virtual city - and what problems could paralyze the city? For my graduation exhibition, I imagined starting with diagrams expressing server-client connections, moving through plans for data centers, and ending with displaying a 'playable' virtual city. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to complete my graduation project yet as I took a leave of absence and started working as a developer in the industry.