Reset button: place in the digital age

Abstract

Abstract The computer is to contemporary society what the machine was to modernism this statement form Christine Boyer has a profound effect on the way we currently engage with our built environment. The architecture and urban issues that come with this digital era are important and have a profound affect on our public services, the character and content of our public spaces and the control and access of power. Disciplinary spaces once described by Foucault are now dislocated, hidden within electronic global networks. This paper involves speculating on how digital technology and communication gain importance over material form and how cities are becoming saturated. Our culture is now one of simulation. The paper draws upon work undertaken at the University of Lincoln and manifests itself both within a Poststructuralist and later a phenomenological framework it speaks of the need to readdress what Paul Virilio calls our overexposed city and what Charlene Spretnak suggests is the flattening process of mass culture. Embracing the need to maintain some degree of autonomy in a world wishing to reduce everything to one vast commodity the paper seeks to through independent research explore projects, which speak of a sensual knowledge such concepts as anxiety and the “un-canny”, interiority, three dimensional space and perception of it, the proposition of capturing “real” three dimensional space as a two dimensional image, the oppositions between the real and the imagined, solid and void, permanence and transience, darkness and light, memory and loss. As Sverre Fehn best sums up “When man conquered darkness the latent generosity of night ceased to exist