2001 - 2002: Global Architecture

Neil Spiller, Phil Watson

Individual projects explore how architecture can be reflexive - responding to changing influences from more than one place at one time, or more than one time at one place.

We would like to set our sights on the future. The first thing to say is that we think we haven't even started fully mapping the spatial potentials of digital technology. None of our current parameters or modalities that limit our work will last very long whether technical or theoretic, all will continue to be prone to continual change. This we find heartening it would be a sad thought to think that we would be able to quantify everything and all the methodologies and theories of digital space, a sort of digital omega point if you like.

We also entreat any reader not to see cyberspace and other new media as a continuation of the tired modernist project. Modernism chucked so many babies out with the bath water that it is incapable of providing us with a flexible enough framework, or springboard from which to dive into these new digitised terrains and to fully understand what is going or likely to go on.

Some argue for a new demystification caused by digital technology. The dumbing down of the ideas that embody these media is erroneous, and contributes to the lack of conceptual space in some of the oft-cited core ideas to what we do. In other words, thinking simply does not do this technology justice, talking about it as a normal part of architectures corporate justification sophism, lulls the public into a false sense of security.

Architectural practice is changing radically, its systems of patronage; its benchmarking and its heirachy are all gone. It's all never going to be the same again and I'm glad! See you all on the digital barricades.