(For those who don't know, I occasionally tool around within this strange little videogame called Second Life, which leaves gameplay and content up to the players of the game themselves, through a series of ingenious open-source tools. As a result, you can find a surprisingly high amount of mindblowing artistic experiments within the virtual universe there, known as the "Grid," created by a series of cutting-edge creatives from around the world; I've been filing reports about such projects since spring of 2006 at one website or another, under the collective title "Gridhopping," and thought it was time to finally bring the series of reports here to the CCLaP site. To see all the past reports, please visit the Second Life category page here at the site.)

(Images below can be clicked on to see a larger version.)

Thanks to Second Life architectural blog "The ARCH" for originally bringing this to my attention...

So for those who don't know, it seems that there's this highly respected European architect named Yona Friedman, basically someone who was coming up with postmodern ideas right in the middle of the Modernist period, 1950s and '60s, and who believe it or not is still very much alive and still working at the age of 85, now revered by many contemporary architects for being so legitimately ahead of his time. He was always coming up back then with these highly theoretical projects that would be almost impossible to actually build; one of his first and still most famous is a project called "Spatial City," which Friedman imagined being able to be built both from scratch in a section of wilderness, as well as to replace large crumbling sections of existing modern cities. The idea basically is to hang an entire city high above a natural piece of terraforming via poles and girders, and to create both a metal "grid" for the space and a series of Lego-like modular pieces that can fit within the grid's beams; that way the citizens themselves can have a large hand on designing their own houses, by basically being assigned a certain part of this grid as their living quarters, and letting them mix and match modular pieces however they want. Like I said, something great for people to ponder in the late '50s, as well as the inspiration for a lot of cool-ass paintings, but not something that's really been that feasible to build.

Ah, until Second Life, that is! Because really, one could argue that Second Life's infrastructure is built specifically to handle something like Friedman's idea for Spatial City in about the most perfect way possible; as a giant grid hanging in space, where the normal laws of physics don't matter, and where a huge selection of modular pieces can be created for resident use and duplicated infinitely for no extra construction costs at all. And so that's exactly what was done by real-life architect Stephan Lorenz (known in Second Life as Helfe Ihnen), owner of a place there called DEsign Island, basically a giant 64,000 square-meter space in which to try out cutting-edge architectural projects. Now I have to admit that I'm no expert on Friedman, so don't know if Lorenz based his construction on any specific criteria the man has laid out in the past for such a project; his 3D recreation, though, certainly is true to the spirit of Friedman's original plans, and within the virtual world of Second Life becomes this profoundly weird and cool experience, like literally being able to walk into a cutting-edge architectural drawing and tool around inside.

In these photos above, then, you can get a really good idea of what Friedman was going for in his 2D flat plans to begin with; this idea of providing all kinds of different prefabricated pieces for residents, and simply assigning them a specific set of coordinates within this metal framework that's been created (here, for example, we're on the very top level), thus allowing for highly individualistic dwellings within an inexpensive modular environment. And since all the pieces are modular, nothing's set in stone; if you happen to lose a tenant, for example, you can simply dismantle the house and present the new owner another completely blank slate.

Of course, let's not forget the whole purpose of building these modular cities way up in the air like this -- to leave the ground a completely natural, completely public space, free for gardens and farms and nature walks and the like. In fact, this may surprise many to hear, but Friedman pictured such a Spatial City not only a good option for Western countries, made out of the usual concrete, steel, glass and the like, but also as structures that villagers could build on their own out in the middle of third-world countries; in fact, Friedman spent much of the '70s and '80s teaching natives in such countries how to create modular building elements out of such ready local material as bamboo and adobe. Yet one more reason he was widely derided in the "miracle of plastic" age of the '50s when first coming up with these ideas, but now fairly revered by many sustainable architects in a postmodern age.

As you can see, Lorenz has decided to take a broad interpretation here of "modular" pieces; although there is definitely a unifying scheme to the overall design of the city, certainly individual dwellings can sometimes be profoundly different in makeup and look in this particular recreation. Like I said, it makes me wonder if Lorenz created the various modular pieces here on his own, or based on some specific ideas from Friedman's notes; this project would look very different, after all, if the modular pieces created were much more uniform in nature and color.

And then here's what I think is the coolest thing about this 3D version of Spatial City, that it's not just an interesting museum project but designed to be a working, inhabited space; Lorenz is in fact renting out all the spaces you see there, for pretty reasonable rates too, at which point you can either keep what he originally designed, fiddle with the pieces to achieve a desired affect, or erase the existing structure altogether and start over. Pretty cool! Here above, for example, is a series of dwellings found on the very bottom vertical level, created so that their "yards" intersect and edge each other in interesting ways; if I'm remembering my numbers correctly, Lorenz hopes that you will donate around L$2,000 a month to own such a space (approximately US$8, or 4 pounds, or 6 euros), and in return be allowed to erect something like 250 prims within it (for furniture, lighting, etc). It's your chance to help him pay the hundreds and hundreds of dollars a year he's forking over to maintain DEsign Island, as well as virtually live and/or run a business from within an infamous cutting-edge architectural project from the Modernist age! For eight bucks a month! What's not to like!

Anyway, you can teleport to [culturegion 132/118/75] within the Grid to visit it yourself; and as always, I actually took a lot more screenshots than you're seeing here -- 38 total, to be precise -- which as always you can find in their entirety at my Flickr account, for those who would like to see more. And for those interested in learning more about Friedman: here is an excellent English biography of him (most online material about him, frankly, is in French since he lives in Paris); and here are images of Spatial City owned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; and here is an entire fanblog dedicated to him. Anyway, my congratulations to Lorenz for building such a great space, for bringing Friedman's ideas to such life, and for letting all of us play around inside of it too.