nomads in a virtual architecture
"Even the workspace of the future will not exist without talk in the corridors"
Gernot Beissmann, DIE ZEIT 7.September 2000
Dr. Wolfgang Prinz, head of a research team of GMD, German National Research Center
for Information Technology in Sankt Augustin, asked himself: why do we create
the best ideas not at our desk, but in the corridors, where we ran into a colleague,
or at the coffee-machine, or at the copier. Any place, where we talk to somebody,
whom we didn't plan to talk to, who might even work for an other department,
somebody who wasn't involved jet and who learns just about our project.
If this happens in real office environments, his second guess was, how to translate
these unplanned occasions of interaction into the virtual space of today's work reality.
The idea of the virtual coffee-corner was born, the TOWER-project. A virtual representation
of unintended communication in the context of dislocated, computer-based work-environments,
where business partners work thousands of miles away within the same network or on the same project.
Dr. Prinz found the right partners in London, at UCL, University College London, where the architect
Alan Penn runs the Space Syntax Laboratory, analyzing human behavior in real office environments.
Stefan Kueppers finally, a German-born Architect who studied at UCL in London and focused on virtual
architecture, provided the link between the German research center and the development of a virtual
architecture, creating the space for these unplanned but essential meetings, Dr. Prinz dreamt of.
The whole project is financed by the EU and the more I liked the idea to put it into a documentary,
the more I realized, that most of the people I talked to didn't understand at all, what this virtual architecture was
all about.
Finally I gave up to make people understand, just tried to make a beautiful documentary and share the
fascination with those who do understand...
If you want to learn more about UCL and virtual space, here is
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