Search History 2022

SEARCH HISTORY: Browsing through the Virtual City

Social virtual reality platforms (socialVR) are the origins of the now so-called metaverse: networks of online virtual environments where people represented by avatars can come together to converse, exchange information and goods, play games and sports, etc. There are hundreds of socialVR platforms to date, each of them with their own features, regulations, and business models. Some platforms offer an open space in which to build worlds, games, and experiences to socialise within. Some are multiplayer games so large, complex, and demanding that communities form and grow within them. Others are real estate companies selling land in virtual cities with no community in sight. This last kind commonly refers to themselves as metaverses, and have multiplied in the past two years. To date, most of these platforms recreate the existing real estate market by means of artificial scarcity: laying out virtual cities on maps that emulate physical city patterns and zoning so that the value of virtual land can be subject to speculation that mirrors the capitalist real estate market. In virtual environments we circulate and organise space without the constraints of physical distance or boundaries, which renders common indicators of value, such as size or location, meaningless. This also means that the virtual city does not need to feature known elements such as street and sidewalks, metro lines, or a centre vs. periphery model. Instead, virtual urbanism concerns the protocols that enable us to teleport instantly between virtual environments, to browse and bookmark them, and to stroll back through our history or delete it. 

Elements such as portals, elevators, teleporters, and even menus and buttons are the roads, sidewalks, and public transport of the virtual city. The virtual mobility infrastructure is unique to each of us: it shapes itself around us and we are alone in it. This brings to question the long standing idea of urban infrastructure as public space and a civic endeavour, not only because we experience these spaces alone, but also because as of now all of them are provided and managed by private for-profit entities. 

In Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City, the urban environment is defined as an accumulation of “urban facts”: buildings loaded with history and meaning. Rather than looking at the city through a map, a grid, or a pattern of roads and tracks, Rossi presents us with a notion of urbanism that embraces the subjective experience over time: the city is a sequence of spatial experiences that, while being unique to each one of us, remains ‘permanent, universal and a necessary fact’. Each of us experiences the city in a unique way, however the city itself remains a collective certainty. The virtual city is more akin to this than what any of the so-called metaverse platforms have proposed so far. We do not experience the virtual city in parallel to a map that looks the same to us all, but as a trail of experiences unique to each one of us, and constantly being rebuilt and rearranged as we navigate it. The virtual city is more comparable to our search history on a browser than to a city map. 

For five years, the Studio Visit programme has been inviting contemporary designers to offer a personal interpretation of the work of one of the masters represented in the MAXXI Architettura Collection. 

For the latest edition, Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, directors of the architecture and art studio Space Popular, have been chosen to explore the work of Aldo Rossi, one of the most internationally influential Italian architects of the twentieth century. The two architects take Rossi’s notions of the “urban fact” (fatto urbano) and the “analogous city” (città analoga) as a basis for how we collectively make the virtual city.  

Reflecting on the recent proliferation of so-called metaverse platforms that aim to recreate existing real-estate market models by selling virtual land, Space Popular proposes instead a civic approach to virtual urbanism. Search History presents the experience of moving across virtual environments in the Immersive Internet (which is the only, ever-shifting, unmappable, metaverse) through a tribute to Rossi. A multilayered  annular structure transforms to the rhythm of an original soundscape composed and produced by Spanish music duo San Jeronimo. 

In continuous movement, the Alcantara sheets immerse us in a soft and shifting architecture whose flowing movement constantly composes new landscapes, looking beyond the physical limit of the material and providing a glimpse at new perspectives. Alcantara supports this reading through crossing boundaries, lending itself to daring cuts,  unique prints, and rich textures. Rossi himself was attracted to the chromatic possibilities of Alcantara during the 1980s when the company hired him to design a small theatre, which remains unbuilt. Rossi was struck by this material, “between ancient and future that, in its perfection and colours, concealed behind traditional draperies and colours, green, blue and yellow”. 

Space Popular has often presented virtual environments with little or no digital means, as they understand that digital screens or headsets are just the latest iterations of virtual reality hardware with precedents such as frescoes or tapestries that date back hundreds of years and that remind us that tactility remains the most important companion to audio-visual experiences.