The increasing use of interactive media in architecture has radically transformed the way we conceive and experience both the subjects and scales of design. The traditional approach of working with isolated, static objects—whether at the scale of a room, a building, or a master plan—has evolved into a more dynamic framework, where the relationships between elements can actively influence each other over time.
The integration of video game engines has introduced new ways of being and experiencing—through simulation, allowing for multiplayer participation in decision-making, and even expanding perspectives beyond the human to the nonhuman. Similarly, film, augmented and mixed reality, and virtual environments have opened up new possibilities for spatial storytelling, dynamic interaction, learning, and the dissemination of architectural knowledge. Today, you can “press play” on architecture.
While these tools offer seemingly endless potential, they are also constrained by their own limitations, both in terms of hardware and software. The catalogue of pre-designed assets, for example, often reinforces homogenised aesthetics, character representations and predetermined narrative structures. Furthermore, despite their apparent immateriality and fluidity, digital environments depend on continuous energy consumption and constant connectivity.
This issue of Materia Arquitectura seeks to explore the role of design in digital environments in an era of scarcity and excess, of placelessness and rootedness, of human and non-human agency, through the lens of interactive media. It asks: What are the implications of environmental storytelling? What are the limits and possibilities of participatory digital design? How do these environments shape current economic structures? How can emerging technologies be used without reinforcing technocratic paradigms? What new pedagogical models arise from these media? What are the effects of interactive media beyond the medium itself? How are heritage and preservation redefined in virtual environments? Can virtual spaces be considered "legitimate" when the physical disappears? Is the virtual degraded?
Materia Arquitectura invites researchers, designers and academics to contribute articles that critically examine the effects, limitations and promises of these media at the intersection of digital immersion, environmental responsibility and architectural innovation. Theoretical, historical and practice-based contributions are welcome that interrogate how interactive media are reconfiguring architectural thinking, production and experience, inviting reflection on both their transformative potential and their inherent contradictions.
