3pointD.com

But a few visions of Ground Zero in Google Earth.

Back in March of this year Google lit up the blogosphere (including here at 3pointD.com and over at OGLE Earth) with the purchase of @Last Software, makers of the SketchUp 3D modeler. Their strategy was to utilize SketchUp as a free and easy means to expand the base 3D content available in the Google Earth viewer, create a website called the 3D Warehouse as a storage area for user submitted models, and provide a 3D Warehouse Network Link to glue all of the parts together.

Six months later, Phil Collinson’s World Trade Center (Under Attack) is one of the top ten most popular models in the 3D Warehouse. In fact, the 3D Warehouse Network Link presents Google Earth users the option to view no less than 43 additional structures for the WTC site, ranging from the original twin towers, the new Freedom Tower, several amateur design proposals, an over-sized aerosol can, the twin towers under attack by a giant cow…well, you get the idea.

Far from its original uses as an analytical tool for demographers, planners, architects, cable news networks, et al, the WTC site suggests evidence of Google Earth coming into its own as a new medium of communication for artists and performers, politicos and activists, marketers and spammers alike. Via the 3D Warehouse anyone is free to squat on a Google Earth location with their own messages, be they realistic or absurd, placid or disturbed.

Perhaps most compelling, these messages manifest themselves as ‘buildings’ in one form or another, giving rise of an entirely new variant of virtual architecture - one that shares some common characteristics with other user-created online environments such as Second Life in that the architecture of Google Earth that need not be directly representative of physical reality; however unlike these other spaces Google Earth imposes a unique architectural dialogue with the world as we know it.

As a result Google Earth is quickly becoming a place to dwell in rather than simply dwell upon, not so much a warehouse as a house of mirrors.

Chip Poutine is the author of Virtual Suburbia - the Architecture of Second Life®, reviewed on the fly.