Multispace

Architecture at the Dawn of the Metaverse

Owen Hopkins

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781394163564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Guest-edited by Owen Hopkins

Multispace exists at the intersection of the physical and digital, and in the blurring of their previously clear dividing lines. Multispace is not a single space, but a hybrid space where, in effect, we occupy multiple spaces simultaneously. We enter it on a Zoom call, when we are in our office and in a meeting with 20 people; when we are cycling down a country lane whilst racing against thousands of others who also use the Strava app; when we are watching a TV show while live tweeting; or, perhaps most literally, when wandering around the local park looking for creatures that only appear on a smartphone screen.

A fundamental question of this AD is why the phenomena that multispace describes are of concern to architects. The answer is that multispace points to a situation that is at root an architectural one. Offering both a collective and highly personalised experience, static and dynamically customisable, and above all at the same time public and private, multispace lies at the centre of a set of tensions, concerns and preoccupations at the core of our conception of architecture as theory and practice. It is the messy space between, with rough and uneven edges that are constantly shifting.

Contributors: Aleksandra Belitskaja, Alice Bucknell, Jesse Damiani, Wendy Fok, Andrew Kovacs, Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, Micaela Mantegna, Holly Nielsen, Giacomo Pala, Paula Strunden, Lucia Tahan, and Francesca Torello and Joshua Bard.

Featured architects and artists: iheartblob, Ibiye Campis, Office Kovacs, Space Popular and Liam Young.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Guest-editor
• Introduction: Architects in Multispace
• The Portal Galleries: Researching Portals in Fiction from the 19th Century to the Present
• The Home as an Infinite Screen
• Hidden Infrastructures: From ‘Spy-Hubs’ to Hollow Buildings that Conceal the New Digital
• Architecture in Postreality: Emerging Approaches to Space in Hybrid Realities
• Touching, Licking, Tasting: Performing Multisensory Spatial Perception Through Extended-Reality Models
• Multipurpose Domesticity: Labour, Leisure and Kitchen Tables
• Conjunctions: Or, Space as Oxymoron
• Celebrating the Glitch: The Multispatial Work of Ibiye Camp
• Architecture is Interface: Latent Virtuality from Antiquity to Zoom
• Very Big Art: Follies, the Public and Multispace
• Ways of Worlding: Building Alternative Futures in Multispace
• The Anti-Metaverse: Multispace and the Intersections of Reality
• All At Once – From Zoom Fatigue to Immersive Digital Experiences: Why Architecture Must Adapt
• Shifting Contexts: Liam Young’s Prototypes of Architectural Futures
• From Another Perspective The Haçienda Must: Be Built
• Contributors
• What is Architectural Design?
• EULA