Touching Slabs: mixed-reality assemblies

When virtual realities push into physical space, the abstractions that we designers had to imagine first, diagrams, sketches, models, norms and regulations, lose their necessity: closing the gap between the virtual and the physical world diminishes the need for abstraction, and what is left is a person and an architecture without a separate structure to represent it. Touching Slabs tests that claim at human scale. In 2020 I placed building assemblies, simulated as combinatorial systems of slabs and frames, into the studio through a Magic Leap headset, so that a part could be picked up, held in the hand and set back into the aggregate.

The captures show what the title of the original page named, and then I could touch it: a translucent slab held between thumb and fingers, the rest of the assembly hovering at eye level behind it, the tables and chairs of the studio visible through both. In a photograph taken on 5 March 2020 the assembly hangs in the dark room at the size of a building fragment while a person in the headset stands beneath it; in another capture the same cluster of glass-like parts rests on the floor as a tower reaching toward the ceiling. Nothing in these images is a model in the usual sense. The parts have no scale other than the one the hand gives them, and the room is not a base but the site.

The work was carried out within a workshop for which Magic Leap provided consultancy and equipment, and it belongs to a wider line of simulation research: the Architecture Cloud Simulation Research conducted with Unity Technologies between 2020 and 2022, and the fully simulated assemblies of my UT Austin studios of the same years. A film of the session is on Vimeo.

Its premise is the premise of an architecture designed between its parts rather than drawn as a whole. If the simulation can be entered and its parts handled, the drawing that stood between the designer and the building can be set aside, and design becomes the act of touching, moving and re-placing parts within a space that is already the building’s own: not a representation to be read but a condition to be occupied, and one in which the next move is as physical as the last.