virtual cities

I enjoy building virtual cities, as in digital modeling, even though it is very labor intensive and time-consuming, so much so that I haven't been home much lately, and should be modeling at this moment rather than writing. However, one must write when the bug bites, as one cannot live by modeling alone, although it is part of what I do to pay the bills. Building cities satisfies that architectural love of the play of forms, which some believe is what inspired whatever god to creation. It is also the basis for the affliction of "designeritis" which so many in our profession are inflicted with, that ingrained godlike sense that what we create must be, has to be, for the best because it seems so right and self-evident to our own sensibilities.

As an urban designer and planner with an architectural background, I am considered (when I am considered to have a place in the profession at all) to be a "bridge" between the differing fields of practice. In actuality designers in each field - landscape architecture, architecture, and increasingly engineers and others - consider urban planning and design to be fully within their own realm of practice and specialized capabilities. Many are quite capable of multiple points of view and an interdisciplinary approach, and I offer my poor contributions wherever such are accepted. There are, unfortunately, occasional outbreaks of Designeritis, during which any attempt to generate a dialogue of other viewpoints with the afflicted party is futile. The bug has bitten and inflicted the Designer with a unique Vision which must be realized in form.

Great Visions are compelling and have a way of becoming actualized in the real world, with widely varying levels of success. As I am modeling a virtual city, first building the existing conditions, then the infill of improvements and developments over time, I find it important to keep it tied to quantifiable, verifiable realities of urban development and placemaking, even in the simple blocky massing stages. What the clients are usually expecting is something different, a "Visualization". As our digital environments, in which so many spend so much time or at least have become quite familiar with, become more photographically realistic, there is an accompanying trend of rising expectation of photorealism to the point of virtual reality in the depiction of architectural and urban designs, even in conceptual stages

Vision, in the sense of sight, is very powerful, perhaps the most powerful of the senses, but is still only one of the ways in which we interact with and experience our "real" environments. This emphasis on photorealism is in some ways a return to the school of architecture as high art, a painterly aesthetic. That aesthetic is important, as are the Vitruvian delights - but the design of human environments must be more than a visual or artistic aesthetic. The form-based school of design requires an evidence-based counterbalance which is too often either lacking or under-valued as something that can be applied at a later stage. The initial pressure and efforts are for "pretty pictures" to sell an idea to the public or to market it to investors.

For some years there was school of thought in the design world that followed literary and linguistic theories, known as Deconstruction. Rem Koolhaas, who was a journalist before he was an architect, was one of the best known proponents. What it boiled down to is the notion that whoever tells the best, most compelling story, wins. The story becomes the truth, the reality, by virtue of the power of the telling. A powerful story or vision can become reality - but what then? What genie do we let out of the bottle? Sometimes getting what we wished for, what we so effectively visualized or imagined, has unintended consequences. That's why I would really like the opportunity to do more research for evidence-based design and put a soul into the pretty shell of the simulacrum.

These images are student exercises and not client project models.