Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace
Marcos Novak, 1991

Links
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~marcos/

Marcos Novak introduced the concept of liquid architectures in cyberspace. According to him, liquid architecture
• breathes,pulses, leaps as one form & lands on another
• whose form is contingent on the interests of the beholder
• an architecture that opens to welcome me & closes to defend me; one without doors or hallways,where the next room is always where I need it to be & what I need it to be.

Some powerful thoughts from this essay:
• He refers to his 3D creations as 'navigable music'
• Cyberspace is a habitat of the imagination, for the imagination, a place where conscious dreaming meets subconscious dreaming, the locus & triumph of poetry over poverty, of 'it-can-be-so' over 'it should-be-so'.The greater task will not be to impose science on poetry but to restore poetry to science.
• Cyberspace is poetry inhabited.The tools of the poet: image & rhythm, meter & accent, alliteration & rhyme, tautology, analogy, simile.....poetic devices that allow an inflection of language to produce an inflection of meaning... Poetry is liquid language.And difficult as it may sound, it is with operations such as these that we need to contend in cyberspace.
• The key metaphor for cyberspace is 'being there', where both the 'being' and 'there' are user-controlled, & the primary principle is that of minimal restriction.
• Visionary architecture, like poetry, seeks an extreme, any extreme: beauty, awe, structure or the lack of it, weight, lightness, expense, economy...
• Architecture has been earth-bound even though its aspirations have not. Cyberspace alters the ways in which architecture is conceived & perceived. Cyberspace architecture is spatialized music.
• 'I look to my left & I am in one city; I look to my right, & i am in another .My friends in one can wave to my friends in the other, through my having brought them together.
• 'I am in an empty park .I walk around a tree, & find myself in a crowded chamber.The tree is gone .I call forth a window, & in the distance see the park leaving.
• Cyberspace is liquid : liquid cyberspace, liquid architecture, liquid cities.

If find this essay to be a masterpiece by itself, showing the pathbreaking thinking of this 'trans-architect', who generates computer-designed architectures that exist only in the virtual world.His immersive, 3D creations are responsive to the viewer & transformable through user interaction.

Submitted by
Anjali Arora

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