DEAR ARCHITECTURE,
May the primary exist forever, eternally protected by the fabric of our digital realm. For today, even this competition requires a virtual submission.
Yes, literally and figuratively this medium is the inevitable savior, your own security if you will, potentially extending in spirit beyond civilization. However existential this may be, it is also an inherently intrepid premonition. Humanity has always built you with permanence and elusive utopian futures in mind. You were conceived, refined, labored, built, coveted, and preserved while simultaneously destroyed, copied, lost, excavated, contrived and revived. In this first few 15 years of this 21st century, more of you has been virtually modeled and captured than ever constructed by humans or our remote ancestors for the last 3.4 million years. Though physically here in fleeting wood, stone, glass, and plastic, your spirit resides in the minds, hearts, and traditions of us all. Though, what truly manifests your hard copy?
I am communicating to you by painting a fictitious wall with a brush and a bucket of water. I fear the afternoon sun. Conversely, it boggles a mind knowing an idea recorded in stone 5,000 years ago, with intention, remains. Cave paintings on rock walls from 40,800 years ago still exist, successful in permanence and sophistication, having survived for millennia. The ancients established their place in history with elite exclusivity. Though in a distant intangible future, you may cease to exist on this planet?
Today, an astute thought recorded online, written with intuitive perception, can be lost in an infinite sea of hastily broadcast trivial tidbits of trifle information, indistinguishable without a certain contextual significance. This may be a dilemma for you, Architecture. Over the next 100-200 years the "Void" opens up in the form of overload. It is in the recorded history of the everyday lives of 10 billion people. It is an informational "black hole," in reality a conundrum, with expanding infinite mass. Assume all who can design place composed geometry into this "Void." Legacies of human achievement could be conceivably forgotten; not by lack of creation or collection, but duplication, technological repetition, and avenues, innumerable, lost to obscurity. The exceptional may exist amongst billions camouflaged and blurred; no distinctions between the comprehensive original and imitation, mundane.
As this text is written in 1s and 0s, you are also being created and destroyed simultaneously in conflict, by the elements, and people graven with naivety. You, along with culture, art, and history are traditionally vulnerable to time and wear, yet will ever remain here in a state of perfection, a place where you can never be lost.
Architecture, the digital and virtual is truly your hard copy, precisely recorded in ideal form, preserved and stored in versions, enumerable. Someday you shall be mirrored in entirety to solid state drives and sent into the oblivion of space in every direction. You will exist beyond every last one of us as an eternal burning torch for collective human accomplishment.
Carry on Architecture. ---Kristofer M. Savial, 2o15