Virtual Reality in Architecture Design
The computer age is here, yet its impact is almost indiscernible and premature, for we often fail to understand the full potential of this impact. This is particularly true due to the rapid-paced, innovative, and continually changing nature of technology development. With respect to architecture, the computer as a medium for long-distance design collaboration, visualizing negative space as a problem-solving strategy, requiring code compliance software, and as a graphic grammar system that generates designs for human interpretation has become a great inspiration to architects and artists. In architecture, this is particularly true with the advent of virtual reality technology and software that permits enhanced design. As Jennifer Whyte maintains in Virtual Reality and the Built Environment, ôVirtual reality is most widely used at the later stages of design, but there is not one single approach to its use. Instead, there is a set of related strategies, drivers and modelsö (1).
Hegel believe that the transition of art history represents a dialectic development from the ôphysicalö to the ômental.ö He used examples of architecture in Egypt, sculpture in Greece, and modern paintings to prove his theory. Since then, the Italian philosopher Beneditto Croce proposed an even more radical notion, that are lay only in the ômental.ö Though conventional are of the era, like painting, could not be freed from its physical components (canvas, paint, etc.), the artistÆs intuitive mind realized the final product. Ridiculed and scorned for his views, computer technologies have revitalized interest in CroceÆs assertion of more than two centuries ago.
It is my assertion that computer technologies offer artists and the arts more freedom than ever before in history, especially from physical limitations and barriers. In virtual space, computerized art only reveals an image concept that the ar...