Science Fiction Architecture
---- This thesis is an investigation into the future of space and geometry in our culture. It tries to forecast some potential qualities within the hyper-reality that our society is slowly shifting towards.

Our conception and understanding of space has become increasingly complex this century, and we're becoming a culture that is consistently fascinated with how things explode, how they melt and transform, and what it looks like to freeze time. The special effects industry, from B-movies to high end computer graphics is the source of many glimpses of the future of hyper-reality. The image on the left, from Uchujin Tokyo ni Arawaru (Space Men Appear in Tokyo – 1956) shows a starfish monster attacking a city. The form depicts a new type of architecture and space swallowing the old. Whether depicted as alien technology or a hypothetical future, these new ideas about space are often culturally introduced through film.
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Aquatic Cyberspace
There are many similarities between water and cyberspace. Char Davies, the creator of Osmosis describes an "abstract, pure sense of space" found diving which paralleled potential virtual qualities. Both spaces can avoid gravity, have a sense of floating, and have a luminous clarity. For this reason, an aquarium was chosen as the program for the project.

The aquarium has also undergone a cultural shift towards hyper-reality. It started in the wilderness just using observation to watch these environments. The next stage was ownership, where the fish and aquatic environments were put on display to be eaten. The third stage is the voyeur. The culture feels guilty about the affect they have on the lives of the fish. They try to simulate natural habitats, but with privileged, hidden views and spaces discretely inserted. The final stage is the hyper real. It doesn't matter how the fish is treated because it isn't real. The observer can explode the fish, be the fish, have sex with it, or view it from any angle. It could be tracking a real fish somewhere else, or it could not. There is no way to know.
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Geometry and Transformation
Like the fish waiting to be eaten in the aquarium of ownership, the transformation of space can exist both as a brutal reality within our current world, and as a promise of change without guilt within hyper-reality. Consider this famous image from Life magazine on the left. This woman committed suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building and landed on the roof of a car. The roof folded around her body and looks as though it barely damaged her. The photograph is less disturbing because the woman looks so peaceful, but the knowledge of the violence that ended her life makes the photograph more powerful.

If this transformation was simulated, what would be the difference? Would it be less dramatic? Or would we feel less guilt because it was hyper-real and appreciate it as a special effect. Probably the latter, simulation distances the voyeur from responsibility. Due to the physical implications of action, reality is devalued. Only the virtual allows for the release of fascination and desire without consequences.

With this in mind, what kind of space would people rooted in hyper-reality live in, what are the references that exist now that will influence it? If the environment can be destroyed, will people always be inhabiting a type of wreckage, or will scars slowly heal? A wreckage is in many ways an appropriate spatial metaphor for the hyper-real. It is created by transformation and has the kinetic and spatial complexity that future geometry will no doubt hold. For this reason the wreckage of a burnt railway pier in New York was chosen as the thesis site. The new "aquarium" is built around the carcass of this wreckage, perhaps as a type of healing mechanism or growth that creates something new.
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Virtual Urbanism
What form will urbanity take in the future? Will everyone communicate over the net, cloaked in a dark room in suburbia? Or will people still value gathering both in reality and virtually. We still will have bodies and eyes, and even if reality is devalued, meaning will be placed on seeing and knowing more than an avatar. It is an axiom of this project that both types of urbanity will have value in the future, in fact the moments where they cross will create a new type of meta-urbanity. Like the digital dead man, our obsession with scanning and mixing life with the computer will extend to architecture. The "aquarium" is proposed as a type of interface between these two worlds, a hot spot where people gather in public, but still participate in the invisible culture of technology.