Breaking Glass

Within a relatively short time, Augmented and Virtual Reality have emerged centre stage in architecture and the arts as novel means for exploring how their creative output is produced, mediated and experienced. Feeding the continuous spectrum between the "fully real" and the "fully virtual," the underlying technology of these media present machine-generated sensorial input where to date the image-based dominate. With these inputs, corporeal existence see "virtual" experiences thrown on the scale with "real" ones as the concepts and models for how we understand perceptional dynamics are shifting.

While teasing the disciplines with creative opportunities, the use of the media presents a staggering number of acute questions, not the least with respect to corporeal experience, the human-machine interface and what constitutes the "real." Augmented and Virtual Reality invite to re-examine established ways of thinking and making within architecture and the arts and open onto an uncharted territory of what comprises architectural and artistic experience.

With Breaking Glass: Spatial Fabulations & Other Tales of Represen- tation in Virtual Reality, select topics central to Augmented and Virtual Reality in architecture and the arts are addressed. It is published in conjunction with the conference Breaking Glass III: Virtual Space, the third and last in a series hosted by the Städelschule.

The publication includes texts by, among others, Martine Beugnet, Michael Young, Curtis Roth and Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg as well as conversations that Daniel Birnbaum respectively had with Sanford Kwinter and Sven-Olov Wallenstein. In addition, a series of visual portfolios by architects and artists presents works. Finally, the publication features the award winning projects of Städelschule Architecture Class' AIV Master Thesis Prize 2019.

The issue has been edited by Yara Feghali and the editorial team of the Städelschule Architecture Class. It has been made possible with the generous support of the Aventis Foundation and the Dr. Marschner Foundation.