AXYZ / CONCEPTS

METAVERSE / DIGITAL ARCHITECTURE

Digital architecture is either a model of something existing (or to exist) or it is a parallel reality.?

As a model, it is an incredibly powerful tool to achieve with a comparatively low cost a good approximation to reality that allows us to better understand the space, the incidence of light, the relationship of the building with the environment, or its energetic or structural behavior and, with that, improve our designs and our built environment.

As an alternative to the real world, it is either utopian and too perfect to be real (like Black Mirror's San Junipero); or it is dystopian (as in so many video game backgrounds or cyberpunk movies).?

But it is always a simulacrum (as we are reminded by those fictions in which a flicker in the image refresh, an event that repeats itself more than is reasonable, or a spinning top that doesn't spin as it should can make the fourth wall, the suspension of disbelief -and the whole shebang- crumble).

• Because the most complex algorithm can never convincingly replicate the permanent change in the world around us, how every creation of nature - be it inert like a rock or alive like a tree - is different from all others; and different every day.
• Because it prevents us from seeing innocently. If it is so difficult to see the world around us with clean eyes, immediately, without mental categories that come between us and the world; in the digital realm the screen, the suit or the augmented reality glasses distance us even more from a world so simplified and planned that it is difficult to see in it something different, richer, than what was programmed.
• Because reality is rough and imperfect and we are only able to parameterize the simplest forms of nature.?
• Because it does not smell, does not burn, does not scratch.
• Because it does not age.
• Because it is inert.

If, as I believe, the ultimate purpose of architecture is to make us feel more alive, its digital version may well serve as a backdrop to activities that provoke adrenaline, sweat, vertigo - and perhaps even an orgasm - but it will hardly succeed in intensifying one of those rare moments of vital plenitude in which you feel in tune with the world.

Iago López is a Spanish architect with over 20 years of professional experience both in Spain and Mexico. He began his professional career working for 6 years in two renowned Spanish firms: Carme Pinós and José Antonio Martínez Lape?a-Elías Torres (both recipients of the National Award of Architecture).

After winning a design competition in 2004, he began a ten-year period as an independent professional in which he designed and built two public housing buildings (one of which received an honorable mention in the awards of the Architects Guild of Galicia); as well as a large government office complex, a restaurant and several single-family houses.

In May 2014 he arrived in Mexico to participate for two years in the construction of the BBVA-Bancomer Headquarters Tower. He is currently working as Design Director at NMS Capital and he has a fascinating blog on architecture and music called “Bailar sobre arquitectura”.

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