"Architecture has created various forms of “utopia”: playgrounds of both the introverted and extroverted, fantastic possibilities, all of which avoid a true confrontation with reality. By its own nature, architecture has a longstanding tradition of creating virtual spaces, of searching for its own forms of virtuality—particularly within the design process itself. Even though, in many ways, architecture was the precursor of digital metaphors (such as networks, clouds, or flows), its referential qualities remain. Architecture has always had virtual doubles—spatial structures in disguise."
Gerber, Andri, and Ulrich Götz. 2019. Architectonics of Game Spaces: The Spatial Logic of the Virtual and Its Meaning for the Real. Columbia University Press.