V.O.W N°34  (29 August - 4 September 2011)

This week's V.O.W has a special connection to my academic and professional roots. As an Architecture undergraduate and Graduate in Graphic Design, the intersection of visual and physical space continue to influence my work and career pursuits. Greg Tran's thesis articulates the architecture and digital media intersection (Mediating Mediums). Furthermore, he explores and re-enacts future experiences that will affect human condition inside or outside an architectural space.   Architecture has long been defined as a medium based on physical materiality. Although it defines and gives boundaries to the environments we live and work in, the emergence of projected 3D or "augmented" technology has recently created a new intervention within that physical space. Greg Tran, the thesis prize winner at this year's Harvard Graduate School of Design, explains how this immaterial stimuli not only encroaches upon architectural spaces but emphasises how we can leverage it to further elevate the human condition and architecture.

Greg Tran explains that the elements of visual and material arts are experienced in four categories: Material 3D, Material 2D, Digital 2D and Digital 3D.  Although digital tools have long been pitched to us as new dimensional artefacts, they are merely another version of Digital 2D. An illustration in vector on your screen is 2D digital, a 3D model and its rotation axis is still a 2D digital experience with slight depth. The same in fact applies for "3D" TV; as they all manifest within the same field. What interests Greg is the potential of Digital 3D not only as tool to improve our visual relationship with space but also as a tool to improve space’s operative qualities. The experiential and informational overlay is the future of architecture and this will impact not only the field itself, but the human relationship to the surrounding environment.  Greg Tran's work is an evolutionary process which will have a revolutionary impact on our human condition and our ever changing relationship to space. Although the vision of his work will not replace Material 3D, it will indeed enhance it by making architecture a carrier of rich data and interface experiences.