by Mark Burry, Kas Oosterhuis, Tristan d'Estree Sterk, and Robert Woodbury

The term "cyberspace," first coined by William Gibson in his 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer, has today almost reached the level of common language, if not common acceptance for its place as a legitimate architectural construct.

"Cyber," taken here to mean "computer processed," conjoins the suffix "space," and in doing so propagates the idea of digitally represented realms, at once both realistic and paradoxically elusive. To the observer, these realms may be perceived as tangible (real) or exotically intangible (virtual). They might, in themselves, be fluid or they might be quite static, apparently realistic but realizable only with the greatest difficulty.

Whether in flux or quite still, digital landscapes, architectural environments, and even worlds, conjure up ideas of new movements — architectural, philosophical, and spatial. Of course it is the sense of spatiality that is the core ingredient of cyberspace, but how new is cyberspace in terms of its meaning?

The Oxford English Dictionary includes in its definition of cyberspace: "space perceived as such by an observer but generated by a computer system and having no real existence."

This article is an excerpt from Cyberspace: The World of Digital Architecture, reprinted with permission of the publisher, The Images Publishing Group Pty. Ltd.

The Idea Cloud brings the architecture of our mind into the physical spaces we occupy. Image: Tristan d'Estree Sterk and Robert Woodbury The Idea Cloud of Tristan d'Estree Sterk and Robert Woodbury is one of dozens of projects in "Cyberspace: The World of Digital Architecture." Image: Tristan d'Estree Sterk and Robert Woodbury   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.