Black Hole Architecture

Buildings are like black holes within the urban fabric, channelling us through to alternate built realities, helping to create a universe experienced as multiple viewpoints or ‘worlds’. These worlds or realities are to a degree created by each individual’s perception and understanding of, and interaction with, the physical environment. Architects design buildings to fit into, or help manifest the world as they see it, or as the possibility of the world (or fragment of reality), they see that could exist, or does exist, but is often hidden (or not noticed). Architects do not build representations of reality. Through the act of designing and building, architects disrupt and change the surface of physical reality. These multiple scattered objects are manifestations of the real, and form nodal points which can, on occasion, reveal aspects of reality. By changing the surface of reality, these architectural objects can shift our relation to, and awareness of, the real. Each building becomes a mini reality-monad in this heterogeneous reality of multiple shifting points of view, like screen-vortices in the urban fabric. This is what we design and build, intentionally or not. This is the situation, which our design actions insert into, much like space junk landing in the urban sprawl. The environments we design and build allow people to heighten their experience and awareness of the real and their relation to it. How do architectural objects affect our understanding and experience of reality? How do we experience and understand architectural space and surface that, like a screen-vortex in the urban fabric, mediates the internal with the wider field of reality?