Obviously I was not the only one architect wondering around in SL and it was time to find the others. I remember that once I asked about architects in SL at one of the “new residents Q&A” meetings and someone mentioned about Architecture Island. But for some reasons I did not manage to get there till now.
Architecture Island is in fact a group of three islands run by Jon Brouchoud (Keystone Bouchard in Second Life) – a trained architect and founder of Crescendo Design Studio. Jon is one of the active members of the group called “Studio Wikitecture” which uses Second Life as a platform for real life architectural colla-boration. Parcels in the Architecture Island are rented by architects experiment-ing with virtual world possibilities.
There are two projects on this territory which impressed me a lot and influenced on my attitude to SL and virtual world in general. First one is a parcel for Studio Wikitecture where people develop the ideas and techniques for open source architecture. The major part of the site is occupied by a prize-winning project of a health clinic in Nepal that was done for the competition organized by the Open Architecture Network. The value of this proposal is not so much in a final result as in a process of design development. Actually the members of Studio Wikitecture were more interested not in designing a building but in designing of a new methodology for design itself. They created a special tool in SL allowing people to take part in the design process and contribute their ideas to the general concept. Participants are able edit any stage of a project and submit their version to the common virtual archive. The archive is done as an abstract 3d tree-like scheme where every submitted design is represented by a sphere connected by branches to previous and following modifications. Anyone from the participants can take any of previously submitted designs and modify it according to his own vision. Modified version of the design is added to the archive as a new sphere connected to the initial one via a direct branch. Participants can also vote for the proposals they like and do not like. The sphere that contains a proposal with positive feedback is tinted in green and the spheres with negative response tend to be red. Versions of the design turned into clear red are automatically removed from the archive. As a result the archive becomes a visual representation of the design process done by many people collaborating with each other in a virtual world.
The ideas of open architecture and its implementation I personally find very exciting. It seems that such collaboration between different people is really something on the cut-ting edge of our civilization development. But there are still much more questions about the future of open-source projects than answers.
The second project deserving attention on Architecture Island is done by Michael Vincent DiTullio (Far Link in Second Life) who is interested in responsible architecture. His virtual studio in SL was designed to demonstrate and test interactive capacities of building environment. Every visitor to this studio can try to walk through a solid wall which becomes more and more penetrable according to the distance between the wall and the person.
There is also a real-life interactive project which was just replicated and scripted in SL. The project explores the swarm-like behavior of dozens of small planes ro-tating towards passing by pedestrians.
Architecture Island is in fact a group of three islands run by Jon Brouchoud (Keystone Bouchard in Second Life) – a trained architect and founder of Crescendo Design Studio. Jon is one of the active members of the group called “Studio Wikitecture” which uses Second Life as a platform for real life architectural colla-boration. Parcels in the Architecture Island are rented by architects experiment-ing with virtual world possibilities.
There are two projects on this territory which impressed me a lot and influenced on my attitude to SL and virtual world in general. First one is a parcel for Studio Wikitecture where people develop the ideas and techniques for open source architecture. The major part of the site is occupied by a prize-winning project of a health clinic in Nepal that was done for the competition organized by the Open Architecture Network. The value of this proposal is not so much in a final result as in a process of design development. Actually the members of Studio Wikitecture were more interested not in designing a building but in designing of a new methodology for design itself. They created a special tool in SL allowing people to take part in the design process and contribute their ideas to the general concept. Participants are able edit any stage of a project and submit their version to the common virtual archive. The archive is done as an abstract 3d tree-like scheme where every submitted design is represented by a sphere connected by branches to previous and following modifications. Anyone from the participants can take any of previously submitted designs and modify it according to his own vision. Modified version of the design is added to the archive as a new sphere connected to the initial one via a direct branch. Participants can also vote for the proposals they like and do not like. The sphere that contains a proposal with positive feedback is tinted in green and the spheres with negative response tend to be red. Versions of the design turned into clear red are automatically removed from the archive. As a result the archive becomes a visual representation of the design process done by many people collaborating with each other in a virtual world.
The ideas of open architecture and its implementation I personally find very exciting. It seems that such collaboration between different people is really something on the cut-ting edge of our civilization development. But there are still much more questions about the future of open-source projects than answers.
The second project deserving attention on Architecture Island is done by Michael Vincent DiTullio (Far Link in Second Life) who is interested in responsible architecture. His virtual studio in SL was designed to demonstrate and test interactive capacities of building environment. Every visitor to this studio can try to walk through a solid wall which becomes more and more penetrable according to the distance between the wall and the person.
There is also a real-life interactive project which was just replicated and scripted in SL. The project explores the swarm-like behavior of dozens of small planes ro-tating towards passing by pedestrians.
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