Designs on a second life!

It is a boom-town like no other in history. In less than four years, Second Life, the virtual metropolis where anyone can become a “cyber citizen” simply by logging on, has grown from nothing to a city four times the area of Manhattan, frequented by nearly eight million people.

Its population is spiralling and real-estate prices are going through the roof as its virtual land is sold to users for Linden dollars, which can now actually be exchanged for US dollars.
It is one of the web’s most extraordinary creations. At first glance, SL, as most residents call it, resembles a computer game – a 3D landscape you navigate with your own customised character or “avatar” – but there are no dragons to slay or points to score.
In fact, it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do at all. Most citizens engage in decidedly first-life activities: socialising, shopping, gambling, even sex.
One thing SL is well primed for, however, is building: anyone can make anything, from teapots to skyscrapers.
The essential building blocks are “prims”, short for primitives. These are geometric solids – cubes, spheres, cones – that can be dragged off a template then stretched, positioned, sized, textured and combined to form anything imaginable.
Unlike the real world, there’s no gravity, weather, site preparation, sloppy workmanship, or planning committees to worry about. It should be an architect’s paradise.
With this in mind, I sent my own newly minted avatar, named Vitruvius Voom, on a digital odyssey across this brave new landscape – to see what the architecture of Second Life is like.
The first thing that strikes you is that there’s no need for streets, paths, motorways, signposts or any of the things that order the real-world landscape, since you can simply “teleport” to wherever you need to be.
Because the land has been sold piece by piece, SL’s terrain is mostly a haphazard patchwork of individual plots, with little relationship to each other.
The only major areas of architectural coherence are those that are designed by property developers, such as Ailin Graef, known as Anshe Chung in SL and the site’s first dollar millionaire (real dollars, that is).
Her burgeoning empire Dreamland, operated from a 20-person office in China, has turned swaths of SL land into the equivalent of themed, gated communities.
In search of something a bit more substantial, I teleport to Architecture Island, created by real-life architect Jon Brouchoud (or Keystone Bouchard in SL).
The first thing to catch my eye is a glass-walled villa on the coast. It turns out to be a replica of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, a real-life shrine of modern architecture. Here it is, open and empty, recreated in loving detail, right down to the furniture.
The real Farnsworth House is in Illinois; this one is owned by Designer Dingson, the avatar of Lester Clark, graphics manager for British architects PRP.
“Given what I know about the real Farnsworth and how it was almost completely unlivable in, this is probably the best place for it,” he says. “I’ve been getting 400 to 500 visitors a day.”
SL is loosely and shambolically generating a new type of architecture. Who knows what that might mean for SL’s current jump-cut geography?
In the future, perhaps SL’s overlords will start to clean up its shantytown chaos, repossessing homes and driving giant boulevards through it, as Haussmann did with Paris.
Perhaps it will end up looking nothing like our own world; perhaps they’ll converge in ways we can’t yet imagine. It is a world in its infancy, unavoidably complex, useful, unpredictable and legitimate, with countless advantages over the real one. Barring a gigantic server meltdown, it is surely here to stay, if it is even here at all.