Virtual Space and Drawings
2025. 01. 22.
In the mid-2010s, before taking a long break from school, I had thought about creating a 1:1 scale experiential space for my graduation project. While observing architectural works built on weak foundations and strong self-conviction, whose actual functionality remained uncertain, I believed that creating something smaller but verifiable in terms of functionality (or non-functionality) would be more meaningful to me.
Interestingly, this idea becomes truly achievable when extended to architecture in virtual spaces (If space is a platform that mediates people's experiences, and if an architect's job is to design space and experiences while providing methods to create them, I don't think it's strange to consider virtual space design within the realm of architecture). After taking time off from school and building up my development experience, I can now create functioning services capable of handling certain levels of traffic, meaning I can now "construct" a "functioning 1:1 scale space" within "a budget and construction period of less than six months."
Of course, approaching a graduation project this way brings up many points to consider. Let's think about drawings as information necessary for construction. While traditional architecture would require drawings showing structural elements, walls, and various details, virtual space construction essentially becomes server-client development, where various architecture diagrams and API specifications replace traditional drawings. The floor plans needed to understand experiential spaces can be substituted with user flows created in Figma or level design documents used in the gaming industry. If the space is dynamic rather than static, it might be better to demonstrate the principles of spatial transformation, in which case pseudo-code takes on the role of traditional spatial diagrams. Pseudo-code is already widely used to explain various algorithms, and from the perspective that many developers implement algorithms in their preferred language based on pseudo-code, it can be seen as serving a similar function to spatial explanation diagrams.
Most architectural drawings were information created to build physically fixed spaces. However, since virtual spaces don't need to be physically fixed, printed drawings that can only represent static spaces can never be the best "architectural" expression method in an era discussing virtual space architecture. We need to think more about new forms of expression for explaining virtual spaces.