"You can imagine New York City being like a museum": the 2010 John Edwards lecture

The Architecture Foundation's 2010 John Edwards Lecture will focus on the concept of virtual reality and its interaction with architecture. Winy Maas, co-founder and Director of celebrated Dutch architectural provocateurs MVRDV, will talk with Philip Rosedale, the founder of Second Life in a discussion chaired by writer Shumon Basar.

The conversation will take a wide-ranging perspective on built and virtual realities, investigating how the two worlds can learn from, inform and influence each other. The lecture is the second in the John Edwards series, which aims to explore architecture’s role in the wider world and how it can influence and learn from other disciplines by bringing leading international architects into dialogue with influential figures from other disciplines such as film making and philosophy.

Rosedale famously believes that virtual realms such as Second Life will drastically change the way people interact, saying 'you can imagine New York City being kind of like a museum; still an incredibly cool place to go, but with no one working in those towers. You are going to work in a virtual world.' MVRDV are behind some of the most fascinating propositions of recent architecture, including Pig City - which proposed an alternative and sustainable way to house the Netherlands' 15 million pigs in a series of self-supporting high-rise structures - and the Metacity Datatown, billed as the urbanist response to the information age. 

Follow the link to the Architecture Foundation's website for further information and tickets.