By Anna Nicolle

Imagine a visit to the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower and the Guggenheim Museum. Picture yourself standing at the threshold of these architectural wonders and craning your neck to take in their form and beauty. Imagine the sounds of traffic going by, the feel of concrete under your feet and the touch of other people brushing past you to enter these famous public spaces.

Now imagine entering a new world of public space. Picture yourself on a private tour of a fascinating structure. You choose what you wish to see first and then wander through beautiful rooms at your own pace. You're awed by the spaces of light and air created for you by the most innovative minds in architecture today.

There is such a place. It's as real as the Guggenheim, but it exists in the virtual world.

Architect Lise Anne Couture, BArch/83, is a pioneer in this innovative new industry. Her New York City firm, Asymptote Architects, www.asymptote.net, is designing such a space that will allow people the world over to visit the Guggenheim and experience its culture without ever having to leave their own homes.

"This is to be understood as yet another Guggenheim Museum. It's not a replication of any existing museum or a representation of any existing museum. It's a new entity. It's a virtual museum," says Couture.

Opening this spring, The Guggenheim Virtual Museum, www.guggenheim.org, is billed as the "first important virtual building of the 21st century." According to Couture, the museum's architectural significance may be as important as its collection of virtual art and digital installations.

"The architectural experience is always something that is seen to go hand in hand with the museum experience and I think that's carried through in the virtual realm," she says.

Couture, along with her partner Hani Rashid, BArch/83, has already helped to expand the virtual world into the practical world of high finance. Last year, Asymptote created a virtual trading floor for the New York Stock exchange. The system is displayed on nine large screens in a command centre on the exchange trading floor. It allows New York Stock Exchange operations personnel to track activity on the trading floor while accessing up-to-the-minute business reports and general news from around the globe.

For Couture this project underlines how the virtual realm complements and at the same time transforms our day-to-day physical environment.

"We are seeing a convergence of the virtual realm and conventional space as we know it. . . in the sense that one has to exist in the other. What has been interesting with the experiments in the virtual realm is that it's provoked us to think about different ways we might build physical constructions," says Couture.

According to Couture, physical buildings are being made with more interactive capabilities and at the same time people are becoming more comfortable with travelling through virtual buildings on the Internet.

For Couture and other architects, the challenge in both the physical and the virtual realms is to continue to create worlds that people want to inhabit.

"I think the most important prerogative of architects is to be contributing to the world that we exist within," she says.

Architects have always been considered "creators and guardians" of our public spaces -- our cities, our office buildings, our places of worship, says Ben Gianni, Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton. But until recently, architects have resisted using computer technology to create virtual worlds. He says there's been an overwhelming fear that "virtual communities" will physically isolate people from each other and from the public spaces that architects make their living creating.

But Gianni says the opposite has occurred. Architects are now looking at the virtual world as an opportunity not as a threat.

"There is no basis for the belief that new communications technologies are inherently anti-urban. We've seen an increase in demand and appreciation for pedestrian-scaled main streets, sporting coffee shops, bookstores. Because people can do almost anything from their homes, they leave them for all the right reasons."

In 1997, Gianni helped set up a master's program at Carleton specializing in digital and multimedia design. The new design and technology stream was introduced as a specialization of the school's master of architecture program. It is the first degree in the area of new media design in the university and sets a standard for cross disciplinary collaboration in the area of emerging technologies.

He says the evolution of traditional architecture into the virtual realm is a natural progression for the industry.

"Architects are trained to organize information in space. The experience of moving through a hyperlinked, virtual environment is analogous to moving through a building. At every point one is presented with a variety of choices -- moving from room to room or from room to corridor to gain access to other rooms," he says. "Moreover the virtual world is rife with architectural metaphors: home, site, chat room, etc. It is literally crying out for architects to get involved."

Anna Nicolle is a master's student in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton.