The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action. The architectural complex will be modifiable. Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its inhabitants...Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such.
- Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism, 1953 Rants and Incendiary Tracts: Voices of Desperate Illumination, 1558 - Present. Edited by Bob Black & Adam Parfrey, Amok Press, 1989
Cyberspace involves a reversal of the current mode of interaction with computerized information. At present, such information is external to us. The idea of cyberspace subverts that relation; we are now within information. In order to do so we ourselves must be reduced to bits, represented in the system, and in the process become information anew.
...To repeat: cyberspace is architecture; cyberspace has an architecture; and cyberspace contains architecture.
- Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace, Marcos Novak, Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt, Massachussets Institute of Technology, 1991
We admire the grand gesture in architecture, but we respect something else. In a computer teleconference on design, Brian Eno...wrote:
...An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface...I think that humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of one. They are not dead yet.
- Stewart Brand in Chapter One, How Buildings Learn, Viking, 1994