+ Revisiting the Virtual House

Chocolate teapots and Swiss cheese: Revisiting yesterday’s Virtual House to design better homes for tomorrow.

Paper presented at Urban Assemblage: The City as Architecture, Media, AI + Big Data conference, June 2021. As part of (AMPS) Architecture, Media, Politics + Society at the University of Hertfordshire.



Pierre Levy, in his book ' Becoming Virtual, (Reality in the Digital Age)' (1998) states:

“Never before have the technological, economic, and social changes around us occurred so rapidly or been so destabilizing. Virtualization itself represents the essence, the cutting edge of the mutation that is taking place. As such, virtualization … manifests itself as the very process of humanity's "becoming other”, its heterogenesis.” (Levy, 1998, p.16)

In 1999, celebrated theorist Vilem Flusser’s essay “With as many holes as Swiss cheese” offers an etymology of the domestic dwelling. He speculates on the future House as the walls become perforated by holes for wires to penetrate, allowing information to flow between public and private. He argues that this increasing porosity demands a new approach to interpersonal relations through the 'production of a new kind of ‘technological house’.

The 19/20 edition of the ANY (Architecture New York) Journal 1998 was entitled ‘The Virtual House’ it brought together world-renowned philosophers (including John Rajchman) and architects (including Ito, Foreign Office architects, Daniel Leibskind, Herzog and de Meuron and Peter Eisenman) to speculate on and discuss the potential nature of such a construction through a series of competition entries.

Now, almost 25 years later, the pandemic has thrust us into this state of virtuality as we scramble to simulate our everyday lives from our homes via our computer screen. On the 23rd March 2021 the sale of the first NFT digital house in the world ‘Mars House’ by Krista Kim marked the start of our immersion into the domestic virtual.

This presentation will revisit the theories of Levy, Rajchman and Flusser, examining the history of the virtual house in order to try and understand the conditions and context of this precarious present. It will also investigate examples of architecture and design practice situated within the field of ‘Home Futures’ for clues to help us understand, design our future virtual house.