"i will revise Le Corbusier: not 'Architecture is a machine to live in', but '(trans)Architecture is an algorithm to play in'. And, playfully, proclaim: transarchitectures and revolutions. Round and round we go: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni."
(marcos novak)

The 'objectivation' of the body as ideal makes it a frequent topic in architectural theory. A single objectified body can be idealized and used for deriving proportions and scale, or transformed into metaphor for a building or parts of a building. Note that the extreme 'objectivation' and disdain that follows idealization, makes people feel the body as not necessary for human existence and suggesting it could be better without it.

In (trans)architecture, computer technology tends to increase the propensity that already exists in modern architecture for form to be disconnected from everyday use and for vision to be the only sensory mode attended to: "In its energetic disdain for bodies and materiality, the culture of cyberspace encourages such an attitude… Disparaging references to the body and expressed enchantment with a world without bodies, or with bodies that have been transformed beyond recognition, promote the message to architects that the bodies we (still) inhabit are indeed a burden or a bore, their everyday needs and experiences a drag on inventiveness and progress." Truly speaking, such a statement is too radical, since the makers of 'liquid architecture' have already created physical buildings - Fresh Water Pavilion (Spuybroek) and Salt Water Pavilion (Oosterhuis) - where real-time sensors and effectors, and interactive projections and sounds are integral to the architectural intention.

The body is our only way of being and a fine way at that, giving us access to rich experiences of the world. "If we don't keep this subjective kind of bodily sense in mind as we negotiate our techno-culture, then we objectify ourselves to death."
The relationship of the body and space is one of inhabitation and movement, not simply presence. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. So the spatial depth of the perceived world, the experience of objects as there, is only possible for a being that moves through space.
An alternative to the 'architecture of the eye' is the 'architecture of the senses' (the other tradition of modernism - Wright, Aalto). The building is encountered; it is approached, confronted, related to one's body, moved through, utilized as a condition for other things. A building is not an end in itself, it frames, articulates, gives significance, relates, separates and unites, facilitates and prohibits.

Partial Conclusion: Bodies are objects and subjects

Our bodies are not naturally given, they are made: they are cultural products.
The way we move and the postures we adopt, even the sensations we have, are all shaped by a particular culture and time period.
Bodies are objects and subjects; we have them and we are them. There is an opportunity to design the material world with the help of computer technology, however the framing of cyberspace as an escape from embodiment and materiality is not conceivable.

Juhani Pallasmaa describes the dominance in modernism of the 'architecture of the eye' which intentionally creates a sensory and mental distance between body and building.
Seeking to distinguish the characteristic of photography, Roland Barthes explores the notion that photography records that, which has been - that it is evidence that something has existed, that some event has transpired.
"Our horizon has shifted from the edge of what is visible to our naked eyes to that which is visible electronically at the speed of light." (Virilio)
From digital photography, to see an image in not to know that some event has transpired but that the constitutive elements of that event are known well enough to have been involved in an explicit computation. Where 'camera lucida' gives testimony to existence, the digital visual asserts a 'camera cognita' in which 'to see is to know'.

The panopticon expresses the desire to see everything from one place, to focus the world on an axis-mundi, or better yet, a punctum mundi.
The pantopicon (pan+topos) describes the condition of being in all places at one time, as opposed to panopticon - seeing all places from one place. The pantopicon can only be achieved through disembodiment.
Bentham's panopticon has become what we call the 'pantopicon'. We have come to the point where we can arrange our technologies in a manner that allows us to project a virtual window where no window exists and see out of it, looking through to any place where a camera can go or to places where cameras cannot go but computations can.

dematerialization of architecture? "Architecture is not just about building, but building might be the smaller part of what architecture is about. The function of any work is to communicate the understanding of the world."
Time is a feature of the Model: if the model is fed-time-based data, then the form becomes animate, the architecture - liquid. Form can be driven by both data and presence. Algorithmic explorations of the 'tectonic' production are concerned less with the manipulation of objects and more with the manipulation of relations, fields, higher dimensions, and eventually, the curvature of space itself. The most efficient form becomes the mathematical description of the Architecture.

"There is no there there" (Gertrude Stein)
Cyberspace, as the information space, can only be experienced through the mediation of computers. Since it's becoming an alternative stage for everyday human activity, as such, there is a need to design it according to place-like principles.
Architecture is the art of making places. Places are made of objects and spaces. People inhabit places, not spaces.
'Place-making' is a process of creating conditions that encourage a sense of place. Designers cannot create a sense of place directly, but the forms they create can help, or hamper, its creation.
In physical world, places are designed by borrowing function, form, and conception from precedents, symbols, and metaphors.
In virtual world, except digital gaming creating a sense of place, virtual architecture is spatialized by simply appropriating physically-based spatial metaphors:
- Objects and spaces functionally and perceptually 'appropriate' in the physical world lose their appropriateness in Cyberspace.
- Digital realm offers place-making opportunities that do not exist in physical space.
In turn, we will examine the four categories of environment shells for developing place-like environments in Cyberspace to answer the key-question of our investigation:

Case 1: Hyper-Reality

HR attempts to mimic the physical world in every detail. It defines the completeness of the imagery, by solving constraints revolving around 'Laws of Nature': gravity, sunlight… Easy to understand, there're still some incongruities: without gravity, no need of columns or beams, without rain or snow, no need of roof as usual. HR captures spatial qualities of architecture without place qualities.

Case 2: Abstracted Reality

AR obeys 'Laws of Nature' to engender believability: objects and textures are abstracted and rendered properly but one could not walk through walls, and needs to use elevator or stairs to go from floor to floor. 3D-MUDs (multi-user domains), example of the 'virtual campus' of the University of Sydney shows that there exists a topology (connectedness) but not orientation. MUDs do not exhibit spatially-based 'place-ness' that they purport to engender.

HC mixes 'real' and 'virtual' experiences. It does not need to obey the 'Laws of Nature'. Many elements are unbuildable in the physical world. Objects behave abnormally, changing size, shape or texture over time. Movement is not natural, disorientation remains an issue.
The example is drawn from Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Case 4: Hyper-Virtuality

HV drops all relationships to the physical world and 'Laws of Nature'. Each site creates its own set of rules, which challenges our sense of reality, materiality, time, and enclosure of space. HV has the potential to expand the realm of sensory experiences by taking advantage of the computer's ability to organize time, data, and space, completely unbounded by the 'Laws of Nature'. An example would be the space travel sequence towards the end of Kubrick's1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The need for place-making in the digital world is not satisfied yet. All four types of digital environments listed above fall short of doing so: they are all deficient to some extent or another, either too realistic, or too virtual, or too literal, or too surreal in the imagery. They do not enhance the cultural experience or facilitate a social interaction.
Criteria for place-making adapted from physical-place-making, to help guide the creation of place-like, web-based environments could be:

Conclusion: Is (trans)architecture a displacement of concepts from modern architecture?

(Trans)Architecture has not solved yet the issue of 'place-making'.
Although still limited by the capability of current technology, the issue of 'place-ness' has not been theoretically tackled and is still blurred by common spatial metaphors instead.
The implementation of cyber-places is a work in progress, however at this point of time, place-making fails to pass the test and we conclude that (trans)architecture is not a displacement of concepts from modern architecture yet.