The Virtual Space Theory

This post continues the discussion of architectural drawings and models from the point of view of The Virtual Space Theory. Vladimir Tatlin’s design for The Monument to The Third International (1919) will provide the examples in this discussion.

Architectural drawings and models are primarily a means of communication. They allow a team of planners to communicate their ideas during the process of designing a building, they allow them to communicate the proposal to the client, and they enable the builders to be directed towards its correct construction. For such purpose, planners have several means of communication available, and each of them embodies a different kind of relationship to the physically constructed building:

Model – a model is a physical simulation. Though it may differ from the building it simulates in materials, scale or level of detail, within the context of an architectural project, it is simply a physical object that stands for another physical object (whether the latter exists at that time or not). Nothing virtual here.

Drawing – Plans, elevations, and sections are a language, or what I call in my book The Architecture of Virtual Space a ‘visual text’. Among the people who have learned this language, the purpose of such visual text is to invoke a mental image of a building in the mind’s eye of each person who ‘reads’ it – even though there is no such building in the drawing itself. When such ‘mental buildings’ are successfully formed, they too can be argued to be a simulation of a physical building, and hopefully, the mental simulation of everyone involved is more or less identical. Yet it is only the mental building that is the simulation – not the drawing which invoked it. Even so, according to The Virtual Space Theory, mental is still not the same as virtual.

Perspective and isometric views – Whether drawn by hand or produced using digital tools, these are pictorial images through which we can see a visual space with a building located inside of it. They are distinct from architectural drawings, but they are another key element of architectural communication and will assist us in this discussion. According to The Virtual Space Theory, this is the only case in which the use of the term ‘virtual’ is actually appropriate. In that sense, such images show a virtual building, and we could even say that this building functions as a ‘virtual simulation’ of the physical building that it stands for. Yet here too, it is not the image itself that simulates the physical building. What performs the simulation is rather the virtual building that is seen inside of the visible space of this image.

Therefore, architectural drawings and models are not virtual. They are simply a collection of methods for creating a simulation of a physical building – or in technical terms, a simulacrum. A model is a physical simulacrum; plans, sections, and elevations are a means of invoking a mental simulacrum; and perspective and isometric views create a virtual simulacrum.

Ultimately, however, their function as simulacra is independent of the changing status of the building they were made to simulate. Whether or not such a building has ever been (or ever will be) physically built does not affect the role of its models and drawings. In other words, if a project is cancelled, its means of communication do not change their nature as a result. As long as the context of their production was to communicate a physical architecture project, they remain methods of creating physical, mental, and virtual simulacra of a physical building.