Hello, it’s great to be here. Doors has had a big impact on us. We’ve watched every one of them, and I was wondering when I’d get invited. Some of you might know that our firm Asymptote in New York moves around in different areas, we’ve been involved in built projects, urban design projects, Internet related projects, virtual reality environments and so on, and installations.

I thought what I would do is quickly take you through some of the works that you might have seen, but maybe explain them a little bit more in depth and perhaps frame an argument about architecture today, very much in following the last two speakers (Lisa Strausfeld and Ole Bouman) who I think were very much on the mark, in terms of where we seem to be going with architecture and a firm like ours, which has found itself dealing with some very important clients on very real projects, moving between the virtual and the real world has become a fascinating experience as a practice.

In many ways, I find, we find ourselves re-defining the practise of architecture through some of the work we’re doing. The New York Stock Exchange came to us three years ago, asking us to design a virtual reality environment for all of their information. All their information basically that streams through the exchange. It turned out that over the years of development and work in the technologies arena, they had discovered the best way to get through information may be in a multi-dimensional space. And they came to us with that in mind.

The first thing we really did was to digitise the environment of the Stock Exchange that exists. These are the actual floor trading posts and the server environments that are outside of New York City that serve and basically run the machinery that runs all the date here and brought that into one consolidated virtual reality environment, which they could basically navigate.
The model functions like this, and in fact looks like this.

This is the virtual trading floor. It has virtual walls that contain streaming data, the data that can actually be removed, the draws of the server landscape can be removed. All the different server environments can be scrutinised and looked at in terms of how they’re affecting the markets, how they’re affecting the trading floor. This circuit board ties those server environments back down to the trading floor and on the trading floor you have effectively a geographically accurate, or geographically similar situation as to where all the posts are located and the posts have their own virtual reality conditions. These are thermometers that measure the health of the posts, all the 3000 stocks are located here. These are various containers, this is an indexing container that’s moving along in real time. Various sorts of feeds, news feed, television feeds and so on.

In the morning for example, when the stocks open, it’s imperative that they all do open in the first half hour of trading, so the operations people use this model to navigate and monitor the entire trading floor and make sure that every single stock is up and running by 9:30. If there are any problems, there are alert flags, there are all kinds of signals, basically they are looking at a fully dimensional simulation of the environment that they use every day on the trading floor.

They can remove various pieces because virtual real estate is infinite in some ways, and as they remove the pieces they can see, in fact, how various things are doing. Here for example, is a lock mechanism, which is showing that there’s a problem at this particular post, with these particular stocks. We can watch the time line reduce as to how the repair is going, if it’s a business related or machine related problem. You can see that the red went off so we can zoom in further to see in fact which stocks are dubbed. Here for example, is McDonalds. And that gives them a pretty good idea of what’s going on at any particular time.

Here you can see various views of a post. Also the posts have what we call a heat map, which is a constantly modulating surface that is in fact telling you how the various panels are doing in terms of the various stocks. You can see them through multiple points of view. And that led us as an architectural practise into designing interfaces.

Here you can see how the interface is used to move around this post. These flags were based on nautical diagrams. They’re immediate recognisable icons that we developed to show you that various stocks are down, there’s a trading imbalance, there’s any particular problem that can be instantly understood through an iconographic mechanism.

One of the most important things for the markets and for the New York Stock Exchange is the fact that they can replay their virtual reality models. This is an index container running throughout the day, you just saw a re-wind, and we can look back over the whole day and see all of the various indices, SNP500, Dow Jones Industrial or Trading Transportation Average, the New York Stock Exchange and see how in fact they’re doing throughout the day and this can be correlated and looked at from completely different points of view.

Another container that we developed for them is called the grouping container, and here they can actually put in any collection of stocks ranging from, these are the Dow 30, it can be tobacco related, it can be monetary, currency related and so on. And they can study all those in this kind of cityscape where they can see how everything is doing. The icons are here, the various stock names are here and various pieces can be pulled out, in this case it’s auto velocity of the trading. And then the caterpillar Proctor & Gamble is brought down and they can all be looked at as 2-D at the same time as looking at the 3-D models.

Here’s a single post again with various kinds of things that we’ve been architecturing into the structure, the ability to zoom in, hand down, look at video feeds that are part of the real estate of the virtual objects. Pull pieces over to other panels, resize windows, scroll through various sorts of data on any particular model.

We’ve continued to develop different pieces. This is actually for Traders. This is a typical kind of working drawing that we produced for our programmers, who were in Israel. And basically what we would do is design all the various aspects of the site, of 3-dimensional environment and then send out these drawings, these templates that included every single nuance and aspect of the project.

That’s actually the trading floor they’re using at the moment. And this is a system by which they navigate around this trading environment using icons, various kinds of other data down here and a dashboard. You have the ability to resize windows, or size up to display a view of the overall floor and so on, so it’s a pretty powerful and versatile tool, coming out of a fusion of virtual reality and architecture.

These are some views onto the virtual trading floor and what’s interesting is that the more we worked with them as a client, the more that they began to change their ideas about their physical environment.

In many ways, this virtual environment although it started out as a kind of reasonable re-enactment of the physical space, has generated views and images of the trading floor that both our client and a lot of people had never seen before.

This is an absolutely functioning image of the trading floor, it’s not a kind of aesthetic image.
This is beneath the trading floor.
And this is the server landscape as it comes up.
And we built the advanced trading floor centre down on the trading floor and I was just reminded by Lisa’s talk, that we proposed that this wall at the back with the glass has almost built in pixels, or what seems like built-in pixels, so it looks almost like a default blue projection. There are 60 computer screens tiled on these little outlets here and they can do a seamless video display across the whole wall of 60 monitors. But we had proposed that this wall change colour according to the state of the markets, going from blue to red, but they had refused that very quickly; for fear of causing cardiac arrest.

This is a view into what we call the virtual vortex. And here’s an image of our new space fusing into the old space, and even things like generating tickers that ran from the existing space onto the ceiling that mimicked the virtual model. At first we were met by raised eyebrows from the client, but we managed to get this space to really feel like, or get closer to feeling like something inspired by and brought together by our virtual experiments, rather than the historic environment.

You have to know that in America, particularly in New York the historic preservation people are very, very strong and particularly in the Wall Street Area, and the fact that we could put a modern intervention into an historic building was a little bit of a trip, but I think virtual reality helped us get it through.

Now I’ll quickly show you our Guggenheim virtual museum which we’re finally about to launch online. This is actually the first time I’m showing some of the content now before we get it online. This is a project that the Guggenheim had brought to us in the spirit of developing a web environment for further art collections, particularly digitized art collections, and in the end perhaps Internet and virtual art collections.



So the idea is really that the architecture is a kind of morphing, continually fluxing object that you can basically scan and survey. The thinking being that you’re really moving over a kind of topology, over a topological object; and you’re deciding where you want to go. As you would in any kind of spatial, or architectural, or urban situation, you get to know the model. You know that there are various functions up here that light up as you move around. You scan the object, you have different sort of channels. You can look at the venues, for example, the galleries

And as you choose one of them, let’s say, the galleries, you can then basically navigate the art objects on the web (and this is a 56K-enabled web environment). The idea is that you can basically move around these static objects, then you’re really able to understand the architecture of the place.

Let me take you to one of our exhibits that we’re putting on line, experimentally. This is a curated photography show. That will run on the web, you can go to the site and see it. And what happens is you basically have a delay and a movement into the virtual architecture, and once you’re in here you basically then kick up a series of all the images that are contained and I think there are basically about 460 images, under different categories and different alphabetical listings, by different artists. You can basically scroll through this thing and decide which image you want to see by which particular artist, there’s Mapplethorpe for example, and view it in pretty high resolution.

You’re able to really get to a larger experience of a virtual space that is visually based. This is a virtual museum that really is about visual output of artists and environments. And basically you have the navigational system. The ability to see the various shows online and the ability to see the work and so on.

I was fortunate this year with Greg Lynn - the two of us have the chance to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, in the American Pavilion. And I just want to quickly show some of the projects we built there, as well as some of the other things that we’re doing as Asymptote. And really the thesis being, or statement here really being, that the two environments I just showed you are web-based and virtual reality based; so what are the implications for physical environments, for the way we build and think about building architectural space in a kind of new lightness, I suppose.

This is one of the projects we built in the Pavilion, digitizing a gymnast doing a pirouette or cartwheel through space and just by digitising the body, we were able to generate wire frames of that movement. And those wire frames were then able to be constructed through the computer.

This is a computer image of what we wanted to be constructed in the Pavilion. Basically, a one-to-one construction of a gymnast, here you can see in the animation, running through the space, actually doing a flip through the American Pavilion, and then constructing the physical enactment of that in the pavilion.

This is how the structure ended up looking. Basically, as you stood and looked through the structure, you could see the tectonic deformation that would occur as a result of the body being mapped into a physical space. On the other side, you would see the animation running of the analysis, and so on.

Now, what Greg and I did at the American Pavilion was run workshops with our students, so these students with whom I worked on this at Colombia University continued to work and produce the same kinds of studies for other kinds of movement and bodies through space.

This idea of the body being dematerialised through electronic culture, through digital culture is something that’s fascinated us as Asymptote and we did a whole series of studies called ‘B-Scapes’ which are based on body armour, or the protective armour used in sports. These would somehow map the interstitial space between the body and the cladding and therefore define a kind of architecture. And then we put them, these ‘B-Scapes’, into a 3-dimensional wire frame model and texture-mapped them very accurately and actually produced a sort of morphing B-Scape that moves you in various of scales, and various kinds of readings, and various kinds of materiality through the various pieces of these body-clad entities as they inscribe a virtual body, by virtue of what they are.

And along those lines we had built at San Francisco, at the CCAC last year, an interactive object. This is a full-scale object, you see me walk in a frame here in a minute. And what it allows me to do, or any viewer entering the gallery to do, it to touch its surface, which is a completely modelled surface, and as I touch the sensors in the surface, the object then goes through a series of morphological changes as well as sonic changes.

That basically was a test to see if we could build a small prototype of an interactive artefact that would have a kind of a reverse impact, almost an emotional scale according to you and your ability to work with it. Another piece in Venice that we just built out in the gardens for the Biennale is this large piece we call ‘Flux Space II’, ‘Flux Space I’ is in San Francisco, and this is a piece where we wanted to try something else, we wanted to building to have a physical presence in the landscape in the Venetian gardens and then to have an interior presence which was in fact tied more to the virtual, more to the Internet.

So what we did was we produced this large nomadic structure. In it we placed two 360 degree Internet cameras inside of two circular mirrors, that are on rotating pivots here. So one approaches this building with a certain kind of spatiality in mind, a very large scale spatiality and then one goes inside it and it’s a much more intimate space and these two rotating one-way mirrors that have particular traits on each side of the glass, because of the nature of the glass, so sometimes they actually show you the entire space, sometimes they reflect the space.



This is another view of the interior, captured on the Internet and related every 30 seconds on the server, to show you the space in a state of constant flux according to your own movement in the space. As you walk through the space, you push the discs out of the way, and as you push the discs out of the way, there’s an interference between this mirror and that mirror, on the two cameras recording each other across this room. You get the idea.

The last thing I want to show, is an idea. We started developing and pushing this idea of interactive technology, spatiality, one could say almost, a sort of emotional states of building; and we’ve been pushing in terms of brand and looking at the future of city space and it occurred to us – and this was partly due to a commission by BusinessWeek of all people – to come up with the future of corporate culture, particularly in the American landscape. This is very pertinent although it was drawn from Dusseldorf Airport and at many airports around the world, where businessmen will come in and have meetings at the airports and then fly out. And maybe the future of urbanism – and this moves very nicely into Winy Maas’s discussion on the lightness of cities – is that corporate culture moves out of city centres and therefore congestion goes with it and moves out, and a lot of other things move out to the airports, where they spend most of their time.

So what we ended up with was producing scenarios for an airport that grows over time. Here it includes IBM's Headquarters, Sony's Headquarters, and so on. So there would be an idea at every airport, corporate terminals and so on, and this would continue to evolve and grow, creating these sort of hubs. And it would work out well if you think about companies merging, they can just join their hubs, or they can just build new hub. They can basically carry, they have an infinite versatility based around this idea of occupying airports based with headquarters.



So the future of these kinds of spaces could look something like this, with the Sony headquarters here, and so on. So each building becomes a sort of brand, or large hyperbrand, which satisfies many of their gargantuan advertising needs. The idea of bringing the golf course right up to the runway so it's very convenient to work, play nine holes, then get back on your plane and off to the next meeting.

Here you see a scenario of all the dot-coms teaming up with IBM for a meeting – a potential merger here. The interior spaces really becoming not only a place to catch your flights and to check in on various conventions, but also to check the stocks of your company, where your meetings are, and so on.

So really creating a world around airport culture which is really moving in that direction anyway, but becoming explicit about it, and therefore perhaps creating a kind of exciting and invigorating aspect to these otherwise destitute places. And also you could carry the office further, so that each plane becomes a kind of extrusion of the office to the next place. This would be a kind of vision for the way that these places would function, as a semblance or fusion between virtuality, reality, branding, actualisation, architecture, information and so on.

Thank you very much.