Its Deleuzean vocabulary notwithstanding, the project description of Virtual House seems to embrace the virtual more operationally than ontologically, as a means to liberate architectural space from the constraint of interiority rather than as an autonomous philosophical concept. Although this is already apparent in the arbitrary restriction of the machine to two cubes and two operations, it surfaces most forcefully in the necessity for the machine to stop by itself, at that point when the constraints produce a state of reduced activity or, more precisely, "when the differences in the system are so minimal that they are no longer perceptible” (23).
Effectively, the vector modelization of Virtual House maps the two cubes onto one another through two operations, and then maps these mappings onto each other so that the entirety of interstitial spaces contained within their differences is absorbed into the system. The result is a spatial form burgeoning with its potentiality, a spatial form that encompasses into itself the temporal unfoldings of all of its possible connections—in short, a “formal expression of the virtual." If this result makes it possible to “model in real space the actual time and movement of the abstract machine relations," this possibility bears the marks of architecture's singularity and its difference from philosophy. Only by freezing a segment or cross-section of the virtual material flux (in Kwinter's neo-Deleuzean sense) and exhausting its specific virtuality (the repertoire of potential interstitial connections it contains) can architecture actualize the virtual (see Figure 4.8). Put somewhat differently, it is only by actualizing the virtual that architecture can deploy it.x
This is precisely how project designer Ingeborg Rocker understands the necessity for the machine to stop:
When we talk about stopping the process, it is important that we don't limit architecture to its physicality, because architecture is also about the process within the building, how it will be inhabited. If we stop the process at a certain moment, we create spaces that maintain the process or its programmatic aspects. (Rocker, in Foster, "Jury Discussion," 36, emphasis added)
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