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Hani Rashid:
‘VIRTUAL
ARCHITEC-
TURE HAS
TO DO WITH
THE BODY,
WITH PER-
CEPTION
AND TIME’
Photo: Alex Cao
‘In architecture we need a hook. We can’t do pure selfindulgent
architecture and hope people will understand
it,’ said the architect Hani Rashid, who, together with his
partner Lise Anne Couture, is director of the New York
based architectural office Asymptote Architecture.
‘However, symbolism shouldn’t be overt and figurative.’
NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE, NEW YORK, NY, USA
(1997-2001)
Photo: Arc Photo Eduard Hueber
What is virtual architecture? Does it exist? Should architects
expand their territory to include virtual reality? These
questions arose when Asymptote Architecture was asked
by the New York Stock Exchange to design a virtual stock
exchange. Some time later, the architectural firm received
another such commission: the design of a virtual
Guggenheim Museum, which visitors enter through the
Internet. Thus, Asymptote Architecture became a pioneer
of virtual architecture. ‘It isn’t terra incognita, though,’
explained Hani Rashid. ‘Architects develop ideas about
spatiality and project them into the future. They virtualise
space. As such, virtual architecture has existed for a long
time. Architects like Piranesi and Ledoux were true architects.
They worked in virtual reality, on the other side of the
mirror. But the computer opened up the possibility to introduce
reactive and visceral space, which doesn’t exist in the
tangible, plastic world.’
-What’s the difference between virtual reality and
virtual architecture? Where does architecture come
in?
‘When the Stock Exchange asked us to do the project,
they’d already designed a virtual reality environment. But it
was meaningless. It was just an abstract field of numbers:
no form, no structure, no semblance to any physical reality.
They asked us whether we could do something with it.
We didn’t know anything about the stock exchange, but
realised that architecture is the architect’s best artillery.
So we brought in order and form and employed everything
we, as architects, traditionally do. No-one really scrutinises
such aspects of architecture as the movement through
space, what you look at, where you are in time and space.
In a physical space we take them all for granted. When you
design a house you don’t talk about how slowly you move
through the door, which colours or which surfaces attract
you, or how the light plays in the house and changes form
and space through the day. These aspects are the underlying
notes of our score, which had to be rediscovered in
virtual reality. We as a group felt it as a kind of awakening:
virtual reality taught us what architecture is really about.
‘A lot of people think that virtual architecture has to look
Hani
Rashid
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