“The global shakeup referred to as the “Communications revolution” has reduced the actual structure of the house to ruins. Material and immaterial cables have penetrated it, have made Swiss cheese of it: antennae through the roof, television through the walls, telephones between individual houses. We no longer dwell, but hide in ruins through which blow the blizzards of Communications. No use trying to adapt those ruins: a new architecture for people who “survive the revolution” is called for.
To begin, we must relinquish geographical for topological thinking. We can no longer think of a house that is placed somewhere geographically. Take a solar System as an example. We used to think of Earth as occupying a place within that System. Computer-generated images now demonstrate that Earth is a curve within a wire net called “the gravitational field of the sun.” We could imagine a house as a curve within the wire net called “human relations”. Within that curve, human relations become ever denser, and the house is that point where the relations are densest.
The new house should be “attractive” (in the sense in which Earth is attractive). It should attract ever new human relations. It must be in a constant process of construction. Ever new relations must be its input, and it must process them into information. That information must be transmitted to other houses. The house must become a knot within the human nerwork, a creative knot within which the sum of information at the disposal of humanity (the sum of “culture”) increases – which is to say that it must be a knot built on material and immaterial cables.”

– Vilém Flusser

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