Recently I have been assisting the director in deploying their website to further their message of houses and hope. A unique studio assignment in the beginning of my fourth year started me down the path away from traditional architecture. The experience opened my eyes to an entirely new world of possibilities. This was 1995, and even in a technical university, the World Wide Web was still a novelty and our design experiment was seen as such. In the subsequent five years, as the entire world has focused its collective vision on the Internet, I believe our findings have been vindicated.
Much work remains to be done.
I continued down this path in my final year when we were asked to design an addition to the Princeton Public Library. I chose to create a digital information annex to supplement the physical collection. The results of visitors' work is then displayed on large video screens surrounding the main reading room, creating a public mosaic of the various user experiences. Using Virtual Reality Modeling Language I was able to visualize how one would experience the space. VRML was a still a primitive technology, but it allowed me the freedom to move through my work instead of just animating it.