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.

This 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.

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.

Diploma Project by Gabi Schillig, supervised by Prof. Ben van Berkel, Prof. Johan Bettum, Prof. Harald Kloft, Sigurdur Gunnarson / Städelschule Frankfurt, 2004

Städelschule Architecture Class