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THE METÀPOLIS DICTIONARY OF ADVANCED ARCHITECTURE

The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture is an enlarged version of the Spanish edition and seeks, as its predecessor, to identify a new architectural will and a new social and cultural panorama. It aims to contribute to forming a vision that is global but not necessarily absolute of what is already showing itself to be a new architectural action, related to that coined as ³advanced culture², present in various art disciplines, thought and technology. It talks about an architecture inscribed in the information society and influenced by the new technologies, the new economy, care of the environment and interest in the individual... The diversity of the authors and the special contributions should be seen as an initial decision aimed at promoting the intersecting and collaboration of visions and proposals along these lines.

THE MEDIAHOUSE PROJECT

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The “Media House Project” is conceived as a strategic alliance, combining the respective potentialities of the MIT Media Lab and its technological environment, oriented primarily towards developing enabling technologies, and of Metapolis and its creative and artistic environment, oriented towards the design of public and private space. The goal: to put forward proposals for the development of a new interaction between the physical world and the digital world, in order to lay the foundations for a new “art of dwelling”.

Every age has produced a particular way of dwelling as a reflection of technological developments as well as specific social, economic and cultural conditions. The piping of water into the home led to the appearance of the kitchen and the bathroom; artificial light and electricity resulted in new forms of domestic organization; household appliances allowed people to conserve food for longer periods and to do more in less time, and TV turned the traditional living room into a window onto a world dominated by the mass media. In our own time, the new technologies of information and communications are transforming the home into a micro-city, a genuinely multifunctional environment (complete with work, shopping, leisure, and rest) from which to inhabit the global village.

Within a few years, the passive physical world defined by purely functional structures which give people shelter, and in which we consume products and interact with the world by way of screens, will be rendered obsolete by intelligent environments in which everyone and everything (people, objects, spaces) will both generate and consume information and, ideally, transform it into knowledge. Architecture, which organizes human activity by means of the construction of space, has the potential to play a key role in this new, hybrid situation by redefining itself as an interface for interaction.

As such, the design of both physical space and digital space will increasingly have to take place at the same time, in a process of constant feedback in which both worlds learn from each other's and their own potentialities and limitations. Matter and information will intersect in activity.

The knowledge society will develop a home geared towards the creation and representation of knowledge, in which the individual, the citizen in relation with other citizens around the world, can live a life of improved quality.

This project promotes the creation of environments that are less technologically cluttered, more beautiful and more meaningful, that help people shape their environments and connect to others.

The Media House will not be “a house with a computer”; instead, the house will be the computer. As Neil Gershenfeld says, architecture will never be inert again.

Vicente Guallart