Paul Virillo- The Over-Exposed City

The erasing of borders has redefined the nature of the city that no longer exists with a geographic centre due to the developments in transportation and communications technology that has increased mobility and urban sprawl. There no longer exists a ceremonial gate to the city, nor ritual processions. Virillo states that airports have become the new gates to the city, “the place of necessary regulation of exchange and communication”. The city no longer occupies a geographical centre or defined ground. Boundaries of the city have become an osmotic membrane, lacking of any windows or doors, marked with ruptures and infinite openings.

Virillo argues that this phenomena, due to the increased importance of the computer and communication technologies on social proceedings and exchanges, more than ever before, has upset the social structure of the city such that increased mobility of capital and people leaves the structure of the city on the edge of being obsolete or irrelevent. Its structure becomes less a solid physically demarcated geographic entity and more the loose framework/platform for an increasingly ephemeral existence.

This has affected the practice of architecture that is subject to ‘tectonic drifts’ and confusion of position such that the notion of distance has all but been erased or frozen on the computer screen.

Over exposure is evident in the erasing of the gap between near and far, micro and macro (by the computer interface), the overlapping of habitation and circulation. Materials used in architectural studies are now transparent (i.e. trace paper, plexiglass, plastic films). Night and day have been confused with the 24 hour clock in service based companies and constant artificial lighting.