ARCHITECTURE IN THE BITSTREAM

Many architects still hide behind the computer, happily dressing virtual images of their buildings in digital lipstick in the hope of seducing clients. Such practitioners are merely seeing the computer as a glorified air-brush. Weaker students are also prone to this critical error and do not recognise the potential of the technology at their fingertips. Even so the technology still needs to evolve before the full importance of computers in the pursuance of architecture is fully understood by the profession. Advances in software interoperability and computer aided manufacture will leave only the most prehistoric architect untouched and like their prehistoric colleagues, liable to extinction.

The words 'cyberspace' and 'virtual' are common parlance and through this constant usage are abused and erroneously applied. They have become marketing tags. One starts to wonder how we all managed to get on without them. And yet what they actually do remains for many, vague. As technology pushes forever on, architecture practice is further fragmented and split. I believe that even since 'Architects in Cyberspace' this melting of professional consensus is much more marked and indeed is accelerating. The more adventurous and interesting architects are starting to redefine their professional parameters. Their architectures involve many more skills than traditional architectural education provides. Theirs is a trajectory of training and retraining. Their architectures are ones that require a knowledge of software programming, topological morphology, cyborgian anthropology and algorithm complexity as well as many other notions and skills that they have had to borrow from other professional disciplines in order to cope with a constant reevaluation of technologically augmented space.

All this leads to a profession that is schizophrenic and eclectic in terms of the technologies it uses. Victorian mechanical armatures arm in arm with the engineered proteins of biotechnology, mediated by the now ubiquitous computer, are common in many propositions. The profession is operating in a scratch-mixed technological track as a variety of factors conspire to make certain combinations of philosophical, digital and material components both achievable and desirable. These conditions have definable aesthetic characteristics.

Whilst we scrabble across time to create our architectures, the notion of architectural representation is also up for grabs. In a recent conversation with Ben Nicholson, provoked by some of my students' work, the issue of the 'site plan' and its frequent nonexistence interested us both. The reason for this interest was that to draw a 'site plan' implies the static articulation of parts of architecture, and further, a definable relationship to its wider context: the city. With architectural propositions that flux, sway, even fly or are sometimes there and at others not, this presents a problem. Ben believes that the resolution of this problem is something to do with the hypertextual architecture of the Web, whilst I am more interested in where this leaves the whole notion of architectural representation viz-a viz the architectural drawing now it is superseded. Can new uses be found for it?

I am becoming aware of more and more dexterous and imaginative architects who see the potential of powerful digital information manipulation and this is heartening. In five years time, First World architectural schools will be full of students that have grown up with computers as just another electronic device . We cannot predict what impact this will have on architectural education, or slightly later on the architectural profession as a whole. In some schools, the use of computational technology is not only to do with the representation of an idea but a main constituent of its architecture. Also these architectures are not normally wholly virtual but negotiate the terrain between the digital and the actual with amazing ease and delicacy.

Much of our investigations into our culture or our surroundings have been defined by the notion of dissection. When we try to understand something we attempt to analyse its constituent parts.Such thoughts have prompted many theories and experiments in pursuit of the fundamental particles which comprise matter. Perhaps the strongest metaphor of twentieth century culture has been and continues to be the computer. These machines and their simplification of complex information into the binary logic of 1 and 0, have been used as a way of explaining numerous theories concerning biological systems. To see bodies - not just biological bodies but machines and buildings - as particles or bits is not new, but it seems to have been greatly rejuvenated by computers' rapid gaining of processing power. These trends have not escaped the attention of some architects.

Spinoza defined the body, of whatever kind, as two simultaneous conditions. Firstly, the body, no matter how small, which is composed of an infinite number of particles. It is the relationship between particles travelling at different velocities that creates the body. Secondly, that the body is defined and affected by its capacity to respond to its context. If we consider buildings as some of Spinoza's bodies and the computer as our means to chart his two assertions and to control them, we have a dynamic, nonlinear series of fluctuating fields in which we can position responsive architectures.

Once we can locate and quantify the vectors of these bustling and multifaceted particles, we are able to transmit their information. Once received, this information can be used to recreate the condition elsewhere. E-mail and television are but two examples, but the theory goes that all of Spinoza's bodies can be transmitted elsewhere. The technology of transmission is the other big breakthrough of the Twentieth century. Many figures litter its development: Marconi, Baird or Turing, Watson and Crick, being but a few. By the end of the Eighties, in the eyes of commentators such as Evelyn Fox Keller, we had developed four new ideas concerning vital information, its transmission and retrieval. These were virtual reality, artificial life, and from molecular biology, nucleotide sequencing and polymerase chain reaction. In 1993 Nature magazine reported, "The latest idea from science fiction to be adopted by quantum physics is ....teleportation...The idea behind teleportation is that a physical object is equivalent to the information needed to construct it; the object can therefore be transported by transmitting the information along any conventional channel of telecommunication, the receiver using the information to reconstruct the object."

Much architectural ground can be tilled by speculating on what some of these ideas could do for the study and creation of buildings and cities. Theorists, both on this and that side of the Atlantic, are creating architectural proposals which take some of these ideas as a starting point.

Some contemporary theorists and scientists are keen to fuse two other notions with this chain of ideas. These are hyperstructural emergence, and nanotechnology. Emergence concerns itself with the organisation of many particles and their properties as a whole. Simple particles have been seen to evolve complex group behaviour, such as bees and swarms. These properties can be seen or generated by computers and can be used to create non predictable, responsive building elements whose behaviour is a product of each sub-unit's evolving relationship to its peers.

Nanotechnology is perhaps the ultimate Spinozarian technology. Its advocates believe that quite soon it will be possible to program the world atom by atom and thereby control its position and energies. This would mean complete dominion over matter. This is not as crazy as it seems. Much headway has already been made. Architecture really blows a gasket then. What is clear is that the particular or - bitty - way of viewing the world is producing up some of the most interesting science at the moment and in its wake will follow architectural theory. Architects are notoriously slow to use or see the potential of new cultural or scientific ideas; even ones as old as Spinoza's. We are lucky to be alive at this crucial point in architectural history. Let's make those who come after us proud.