Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, UIRA, 2012. UIRA is the space architecture and urban planning design for the first orbital Olympic Village in history.

"The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization."
— Frank Lloyd Wright

Virtual does not mean exclusively what is immaterial, what is potentially present. This is one of the meanings of the Latin word virtus, which also implies a sense of potentiality in the thing in itself.
Generally, we say that something is "virtually" possible when we mean that it is potentially possible. But, beyond that, something that is virtual brings in itself the immanent presence of many possibles, of the unexpected, of the surprise, of discovery.
Infinite, no longer in the sense of the far away without end, of the unreachable distant, but yes, of what does not end in itself.
This is the essential meaning of virtus, of potentiality.
Today, you can easily reach images of the frontiers of the Universe, virtually walk on Mars, or penetrate deeply into the atomic structure of matter using your small personal computer at home.
In this world, architecture design can also be scientific research, a work of art, a philosophical reflection, a book, a film, an installation – without ceasing to be architecture.
The role of identifying the various dimensions of infinity became something characteristic of each one of us, like poetry.
In such shared trans-dimensional creative work we become aware of the logical structure of thought.
Architecture is time design. When we change the space fabric, we also change who we are.
Design of thought.
Since the beginning, in the early 1980's, I have held these principles as essential to my work. In 1980 I coined the concept of "virtual architecture" – a method to work with synthetic and integral virtual systems on architecture. In that same year, I started the elaboration of the first virtual planet in history, anticipating Second Life by more than twenty years. In 2000 I started working on space architecture.
In the design of thought, what I call "logical traps" has always been present – subversive elements at a logical level that unchains awareness. Only difference produces consciousness. In this way, architecture is transformed into enlightenment, permanent discovery, self-knowledge.
Such an approach leads, since its inception, to a permanent research on Theory of Thought, on neurology – especially space-time cognition, and also on cyberspace and on logic.
In a clear sequence after Richard Buckminster Fuller and Paolo Soleri, among some others, it is a process that generates a new architecture, in dynamic symbiosis producing a new sense of human scale.
One could call this an "experimental architecture" – but, not only it is to be built, as all architecture ought always be experimental, it should always take life as a powerful laboratory to discover the human space-time of the future. Because the future is now: a present in permanent metamorphosis.
As Bucky Fuller said: don't fight forces, use them.
No longer the architecture-shell, the architecture as decoration or illustration, or art as urban handicraft. But yes, an architecture-thought, creative, discovery, infinite in itself.