TOWARD VIRTUAL-REALITY IN ARCHITECTURE - CONCEPTS AND SCENARIOS FROM THE ARCHITECTURAL SPACE LABORATORY

Virtual reality is the logical step that started way back in time with the appearance of the very first architectural drawing, This has been a long history of development: architectural drawings in Europe, whic h date back to the tenth century, were the first kind of abstraction t hat appeared ''virtually real'' to potential clients and builders-real enough to base decisions on. With the discovery of perspective techni ques, drawings became more refined and developed into a form of art wi th numerous branches, ranging from technical drawings to presentation drawings. Wooden models appeared even before the Renaissance and were supplemented in the nineteenth century with cardboard models. Each new invention helped to improve the understanding of projects and archite cture by reducing abstraction, while increasing the complexity of the representation (Schmitt, 1993). Toward the end of the twentieth centur y, the majority of architectural projects were and are never realized. Prominent projects, such as the new Berlin Government Centre, result in several hundred professional competition entries. With the advent o f virtual reality (VR) techniques, architects will at first intensely criticise the new technology, before adopting and improving it, and th ey will modify it with domain specific contributions. The knowledge of architectural abstraction and simulation is useful to the further dev elopment of VR and vice versa. Today, the newest methodological and te chnical instruments help designers to create a more responsible archit ecture, many aspects of which can be experienced and tested before con struction. This includes the possibility of expanding the number of se nses addressed for the explanation of an architectural idea, To struct ure the discussion about VR in architecture, we first describe the the oretical framework, then move to the description of a Architectural Sp ace Laboratory at the Architecture Department of the Swiss Federal ins titute of Technology, ETH Zurich, and follow this with examples of pro gram development. We conclude with speculations on the impact of the n ew technology on the architecture of the future.