This architectural project deals with the change of tourism in the time of globalisation and information technologies invading body and space and their influence on architecture.

In the past tourism used to produce distance between the traveller and his everyday life and location and constituted a protection against informational flows. The new media has turned this condition upside down and information invades space and body constantly, independent where one is located. We all have become modern nomads. Technology creates distanclessness and dislocation: Touristy time becomes reversible and touristy space changes into elastic condition. Boundaries between the real and the virtual, the local and the global, the physical and the mental, the private and public become blurred and manipulated through new media devices. Mobility has reached a fluid state and in a progressively homogenized world we are facing a futility of mobility.

My architectural design proposal hypothesises that the second home, a holiday house, has turned into a simulation and staging of reality for the inhabitant who belongs to the category of the modern nomad. During the architectural design process military strategies were adapted to invade maps and space on Lanzarote. Especially on the Canary Islands temporary mobility and migration can be compared to military invasion strategies in terms of logistics. It is like a transport box that enfolds as soon it has arrived in the location. It includes essential imports such as water, but also the tourists themselves. The machinery enfolds itself by arriving on the island. Also temporary equipment that tourists carry can be compared with the survival kit of modern soldiers. Armed with cameras and cars the island is being invaded. The map works as registering datum, as well as the geographical surface registers every movement.

The house that has been designed for a global nomad works as a knot of interpersonal networks: it is no artificial shell, but a curve of a field of interpersonal relations, a field where relations are gravitated against. While collecting, processing and storing information of the user, it circulates the data into a roof- and wall-less architecture that is open worldwide and whose doors and windows are reversible. It becomes a reticular projector for alternative worlds.

The house emerges as a programmed landscape, a datascape that consists of different parts, active and inactive spatial fields, infrastructural data that is informed by the user and its movement through space. Different zones emerge that mediate between each other: the electronic and digital infrastructure enables information flows and communication inside the house and also with its environment. On top, a free, continuous ephemeral space spirals and loops like an infinite thread, adapting to all situations and representing projective space. Spaces can be switched on and off by the interaction of the user with the house. The latter space is connected to a fixed or stabilizing spatial element, made from concrete. In the lowest part the buried, most private space is located, representing silence due to its distance from the other parts.

The pixel façade of the house reacts via sensors on the degree of occupation and expresses through different grades of transparency, the exposure of the user inside the house. If nobody stays in the house it becomes a complete introverted space and the higher the movement is inside the more extreme is the exposure of the inhabitant. Public and private, inside and outside, the artificial and the natural completely blur – through the change of colours and transparency (chameleon-like), the façade becomes a digital ornament. A view out to the landscape is enabled, but also the view from landscape to the inside. This “inverted electronic shadow” relates to the extreme exposure of a global nomad, being invaded by information and not being able to escape from it anymore.

The inside´s detailing of the house is based on a hierarchy of information. Normal functions, such as working, sleeping or living do not exist anymore. Surfaces and programmes are rather coded into a four digit code, including shortcuts for characteristics of spaces, indicating the state of exposure, the sense that is addressed, type of materiality and the nature of information. The house becomes a stellar topography which structure modifies the organism of spaces and produces new relations. It acts as a virus-like invasion that transforms the landscape it is located in and is therefore based on a war-like strategy of invasion. Surfaces are articulated according to their codification to generate their specific characteristics. These emerging structures enable mediation between programmes, materials and senses. The house itself becomes like a landscape that allocates different furniture that is just found on the way.

This house does not exist, as also tourism as we knew it, does not exist anymore. Tourism has become simulated distance. The second home, the holiday house has become a simulation and staging of reality or a quest for a new realism. Reality is just a test and the house has become an immaterial datascape for a global nomad.