The production of the virtual Foreign office architects ltd. Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Farshid Moussavi

YOKOHAMA PROJECT

MODELVIEW FROM THE TOP OF PIER, MODELVIEW FROM THE BOTTOM OF PIER

CG IMAGE OF ROOF PLAZA, APRON PLAN

TERMINAL SECTION PLAN ,CIVIC FACILITIES PLAN

BIFURCATION: APRON / DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL HALL

DEPATURE AND ARRIVAL HALL

BIFURCATION: CRUISE DECK / VISITOR'S DECKENTRY TO RESTAURANTS, SHOPPING SPACE

RESTAURANT CRUISE DECK

TERMINAL SECTION SHOPPING SPACE

It is obvious that information technology has been a very important tool in the development of our work, and in the achievement of the form of virtuality that we are talking about: not so much as a tool for the simulation of reality, but rather as a tool for "modelling", in the broad sense of the term. To make a "model" means to design a device that, in the absence of verified data about its behaviour, simulates a system. Information technology becomes in this way an ideal tool for the production of the virtual, not as the reproduction of the real. The computer not only allows us to mimic a pre-existing reality, but also to construct organisations and images that we had never seen before, and that we could have never seen -and therefore we could have never imagined- without its existence. "Idea" and "Image" were the same word in ancient Greece; in other words, we can only conceptualise what we can see. If the realisation of the possible is a matter of interpretation, or re-description of a given set of identities or organisations, the actualisation of the virtual can never operate by resemblance, and therefore it requires from tools that will allow us to see -and therefore to imagine, to conceptualise- what we have never seen before. The visualisation and operation with numerical data on n-dimensional spaces available through information technology allows us to introduce other parameters in the architectural drawings, such as time, light, temperature, weight..., that we were not able to visualise previously, and to test the behaviour of a system under conditions that are not experimentally verified, to explore situations beyond the accumulated knowledge or experience that we have from urban or architectural systems. It is precisely this capacity to expand our perception to domains beyond our experiential knowledge, and to control and determine with incredible accuracy the processes of construction of the environment that make the computer an ideal instrument for the production of the virtual

.PUSAN PROJECT