A new generation of computer network software aims at building virtual communities: permanent (or at least recurring) online meeting places where people can work and play, buy and sell, gossip and govern, flirt and fight and generally seek their fortunes.

The first such places are being built more or less ad hoc. Their builders are mostly innocent of the history of human efforts to shape the spaces where people live so that these might better serve people's needs and express their dreams. Construction tools appropriate to the physical (i.e. electronic) constraints of shared online environments are rapidly becoming available. But there is no generally accepted conceptual framework for their design, no body of validated experience to guide their construction. There is not yet an architecture for cyberspace.

In a world so new that its most fundamental properties are still being created (gravity, for example), Cyberspace designers confront - consciously or not - many of the classic architectural challenges:

• Selecting from alternative construction approaches and materials. The "native" medium of cyberspace, a finely woven mesh of polygons with subtly refractive polychrome surfaces, demands more machine resources than most visitors can currently afford. A richly realized environment is thus, in cyberspace as elsewhere, inevitably an elitist one. Buildings based on simple cubes covered with low-resolution bitmaps are accessible to all, but are also banal and dispiriting. How can we build virtual villages that are at once idiomatic, pleasant to be in and socially inclusive?
• Using pre-fabricated elements to reduce costs and speed up construction. Cyberspace is made of software, and software engineers have been wrestling for decades with a problem that is also central to modern architecture: how can systems be modularly designed to make them both more economic and more reliable? Here, however, the issues are more complex, since cyberspace communities are built on a constantly shifting infrastructure: In fact, the relationship between structure and infrastructure is all but reversed: how can we design places for human community that can survive a continual re-design of the foundations on which they are built?
• Supporting sensible patterns of traffic flow. In most virtual settings, people can fly. In some, they can also "beam" instantly from one point to the next, ignoring all barriers. People may be present without taking up any visible space, or alternatively their virtual representative ("avatar") may be so huge or so resource-intensive that it fills a space intended to hold a hundred visitors. What is "traffic" when the users of a space are themselves constructs produced by other (perhaps even antagonistic) designers?
• Designing to human scale. In the virtual world, the role of "size" as a design factor is disconcertingly variable. It depends on the visitor's/user's field of view and functional reach, which in turn depend on the power of the user's display and controls. It is like the shift to electronic music, where timbre, volume and tonal range, once given by the physical nature of instrument, become variables which the composer/performer must learn to control. Issues of appropriate scale don't go away, but must be redefined in relative terms: what is the ratio of sizes that must be maintained to support different experiences?
• Designing new structures (or re-purposing old ones) to enhance existing settings. The Musee D'Orsay and the new subterranean entrance arcade created for the Louvre will soon have their analogues in cyberspace: perhaps a conference room smuggled into the design model of an automobile engine, or an entire city whose "streets" are the circuit diagrams of a computer processor. Current work to build a database of 3D images (the "Digital Human") to serve as an explorable setting for medical education suggests part of the challenge: how can virtual reality help make physical/natural structures more accessible? The far broader issue is: how can we connect the various virtual environments we build to one another? What design criteria can be established to aid the process of linking new worlds to old?

The would-be cyber-architect navigates this maze of conflicting constraints in search of more than just the solution to a puzzle. In cyberspace as in the physical world, the goal of architectural design is always a place which, while fulfilling its various functions, also communicates something to (and about) the people who use it.

Consider this note an invitation - or even a call or help. Architects have been refining their approaches to this recurring challenge for generations, and ARCH+ is one of today's most articulate centers of that centuries-long investigation. There is a profound need for architectural insight into the task of building virtual environments that are fit for human habitation. On the other hand, the software community has learned some quite general lessons about the design of structures flexible enough to survive repeated changes to their support systems, and open enough to support repeated re-thinkings as to their functionality -- topics of no small interest to anyone who designs physical places for people in today's madly changing world. Our two communities have a lot to say to each other: a conversation that cannot begin soon enough to suit me.

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