PHOTOS: ISTVAN VIRAG (C) PUNKT Ø / MOMENTUM 9
Susanne-Ussing + Carsten Hoff (DK)
Atelier Cyberspace (1968–1970)
Atelier Cyberspace was the result of a collaboration between artist Susanne Ussing and architect Carsten Hoff. It is a pioneering project in terms of imagining the use of computers as creative tools to radically reshape how we build – and live in – the social spaces of our contemporary society. Ussing and Hoff invented the notion of “cyberspace” to describe architectural projects that would use computer programming to create new visionary forms of human housing, which celebrated diversity over uniformity, sensuality over rationality, the organic over the inorganic. More than a decade before author William Gibson defined cyberspace as a new digital reality with “dark socio-political overtones”, they proposed a far more optimistic version, where technology would enrich human life and housing. Atelier Cyberspace never realized any actual buildings but the models, sketches, and ideas nevertheless remain a relevant proposal for contemporary – and future – architecture.
