Prototypes of the Informational Revolution

Tobias Klein

By 2015, the world's IP networks will be transferring 7.3 petabytes of data every five minutes (the equivalent of every movie, ever made, every 300 seconds). Even now in 2011 we are living in a world where the online gamers playing World of Warcraft constitute a population twice as big as Austria's; where Facebook, with over 500 million profiles, represents the world's third largest country; where the biggest single marketplace is eBay; and yet where Amazon, another huge global shopping mall, employs only 12 people to operate each of its distribution centres. This digitised culture is increas- ingly enveloping and defining our lives, and yet architecture has been very slow to adapt to the dynamism, to say nothing of the realities of this condition.

Tackling this failing, Diploma 1 sets out to design interfaces for the informational revolution, establishing a set of prototypical architectures situated in the in-between of data highways, sensorial accumulations, social web applications, CCTV, data archives, Skype and web 2.0 platforms on the one hand, and within the actuality of public spaces, cultural institutions, ecclesiastical spaces, banks and civic structures on the other.

The testing ground for these prototypes will be the Square Mile of the City of London – an area that epitomises the tension between the scarcity of the real and the abundance of the virtual. You (and your own tremendously successful avatar) will be asked to define agendas within the simultaneity of this site and the cultural context of an informational revolution, choosing civic spaces to reconstruct, mutate and evolve into prototypes and new typologies for an augmented urban landscape – the pearly gates of cyberspace. We will celebrate the arrival of a dynamic architecture that allows the emergence of new cathedrals of an augmented reality.

The unit will involve the construction of a data-as-phenomenon installation at the end of the first term, and a field trip to Hong Kong – another artificial, articulated environment. Throughout the year we will collaborate closely with the research-by-design network horhizon through a series of lectures, seminars and technical workshops.

Unit Staff

Tobias Klein studied architecture at the RWTH Aachen, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and gained his Diploma and MArch at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

He is a founder of .horhizon, an experimental architectural design platform, was a unit master at the Royal College of Art and visiting lecturer at the University of Innsbruck. He has taught First Year and Media Studies at the AA since 2008.