Architecture as Fabulated Reality

The book, Architecture as Fabulated Reality, marks the culmination of AAPK’s four experimental architectural projects, which employed virtual reality technology (VR) as the primary medium.

The four projects explore a new emerging sense of spatiality, fabulating and questioning the notion of reality based upon shared backgrounds and attitudes to contemporary architectural discourse.

To enhance ideas advanced by AAPK, the book invites four guest contributors from the architectural academic field in forms of critical essays or an interview. They reveal their collective interest in the power of the image and in forms of reality, in medium specificity and digital technology, and in presentation and representation along disciplinary lines. The subject of the book becomes clearer by curating and connecting each text, and meanwhile, makes it possible to reflect upon the situation that architecture is facing in the reality crisis caused by today’s digital technology or image culture.

Throughout this volume, AAPK maintains one key premise: to regard the architectural discipline as a set of fabulated and fictitious ideas. It is based on the belief that the ‘virtual’ is not synonymous with the fake, but is another version of the ‘real’. Here, AAPK is committed to the exploration of autonomous aesthetic-spatial realms that can be accessed from within the discipline, regardless of the buildings or other physical forms onto which the discipline was once projected (to be real) in the past.