Finally this is what cyberspace is all about. It is, in a way, the revenge of the architects, urbanists, and environmentalists upon the media moguls, computerists, and developers. Even as the world we know becomes placeless under their ministrations, and even as we fight to preserve and enrich it, so we must construct another one which we have not yet fully seen, a world in another image and from a material that is actually the universe’s oldest and only material: information itself.
Predictor: Benedikt, Michael L.
Prediction, in context:In a lecture at the “New Urbanism Symposium” at Princeton Oct. 17, 1992, that was also developed into a chapter for the book “The New Urbanism,” Michael Benedikt says: ”I advocate an aggressive return by architects to the material reality of their buildings, to the questions of tectonics, ecology, and economy, to the art of construction, and to the romance of inhabitation in cityspace. Here alone lie the nuances of water and wind, of sun and stone and roof and sail, the taste of food and the touch of a lover … Simultaneously, I advocate a bold advance by some architects into the realm of the unreal, into cyberspace, to reclaim the space and the community now lost, squandered, latent, in flows of information through wires, cables, and fibers world over. Architecture has always managed the information in space; now it must manage the space in information. For finally this is what cyberspace is all about. It is, in a way, the revenge of the architects, urbanists, and environmentalists upon the media moguls, computerists, and developers. Even as the world we know becomes placeless under their ministrations, and even as we fight to preserve and enrich it, so we must construct another one which we have not yet fully seen, a world in another image and from a material that is actually the universe’s oldest and only material: information itself.”
Date of prediction: October 17, 1992
Topic of prediction: Community/Culture
Subtopic: Virtual Communities
Name of publication: The New Urbanism
Title, headline, chapter name: Cityspace, Cyberspace and the Spatiology of Information
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.ar.utexas.edu/center/benedikt_articles/cityspace.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Boone, Jason Matthew