This report is devoted to the problem of comfortable autonomy for the life in post-industrial city’s architectural space. Historically the character of our relations with the space has been changed: from transformations of natural space to the stages of "virtual" world's creation. The new opportunities of communication already destroy the structure of physical space and make it "virtual", transforming a real architectural landscape of a city into a network structure of central points and connections between them. This image corresponds to a structure of cyber-space or "world wide web". The modern city can be interpreted not as the calendar text of space but as "hypertext" – multilevel system of nonlinear space organization having ability to self-development.
Architecture was traditionally understood as an activity for the formation of geometric spaces on the base of social functions and cultural rituals. Cultural rituals dictated the topography and symbolic geometric parameters of the architectural real space. One of the main category of the architectural space in an ancient city was the "topos". Site and than topos were realized not as a some point in the uniform space, but as a semantic centre, around which surrounding space was formed. The idea of "topos" is idea of living in the architectural space as "here and presently", this idea fixed unity of space and time. The image of an ancient city was fixed in the steady geometric form, which was contained in the mythopoetic consciousness of humankind. Practically the Image of an ancient city was not changeable, its prototype was translated through the time. An ancient city was only the reflection of the "celestial town" which was unchangeable and geometric order of this "celestial town" must be repeated in the real space (in the structure of an ideal city).
This space really has only two dimensions. The third vertical dimension is existing only as a dual semantic opposition "there" ("celestial" town on the heaven) and "here" ("terrestrial" town at the land). The development of such pre-spatial culture lasted till the epoch of The Middle Ages. A medieval space was not yet a three-dimensional structure, and was presented by the two-dimensional distribution of objects on planes, which was based on symbolic relations. The vertical axis in gothic was not real, but "existential" axis. The Renaissance culture made a revolution in the perception and representation of the spatial structure. A third dimension was brought into the virtual space of painting and into the architectural practice. Now we are going through a new revolution. The perspective three-dimensional space, spherical organization of three-dimensional space around the central position of the person is substituted by illusory spaces, which are floating and transforming. The new nature of space produced an offset of centers membrane boundaries and the uncertainty of distances. The "site" strategy in the new space is being replaced now by the "non-site" strategy. The physical space of perception is being replaced by the existential space of meanings, the topography of space is replaced by its topology. And in the hypertext of modern city both of these opposite strategies take place: the strategy of reconstitution of "genios loci" and strategy of "non-site" or the strategy of dislocation. The tendency of changing the status of "site" in the architectural space and the development of communications, destroying the homogeneity of space structure, brings the new semiotic mapping. The classical static picture of the world becomes a dynamic scheme of live, which generates new experiences of living. The Instability and the "slide" in the space and the time adopt new course of the making of an architectural space. Today physical borders of architectural space and distances play small role. The three-dimensional geometric perspective space of the Renaissance culture, which changed, the two-dimensional symbolic space in Middle-Ages, now is changing into the dynamic field of images and representations. But really in a hypertextual space two inconsistent paradigms, which possible to mark as the paradigm of progress and the paradigm of history or as Aristotel's paradigm and Plato's paradigms exist.
As a result, hypertextual space of a modern world is looking as a poliphonic and polysemantic field. In it's structure different strategies of comprehension a space take place. In spite of this, hypertextual structure of modern city imparts stability to the image, produced by it through the process of constant changes in the urban space and with increase in the velocity of this changes.
The hypertextual city system is steady to transformations, because it unites a sum of textual spaces, which can be changed independently from the primary structure, which unites them. Architecture in the structure of hypertext is a primary system of regularizing a base space, and it fixes the primary structure of the image of a city. The range of the separation of internal spaces in the structure of a hypertext can be sufficiently different. The information and sign structure of relations in the hypertextual space is based on the system of references, which linking textual spaces together. And the hypertextual architecture has virtual boundaries and system of marking places (locations) having value for the "reader"of the hypertext of a city. So, as we can see, the poetics of architectural compositions in the creation of a hypertextual space of a modern city is based on the expansion of the spectrum of principles underlying the semantic field of the modern epistheme, whereby transformations of the spatial language of architecture take place. But in practice, this hypertextual model of the modern city is only one way of the future development.
The aspectual variety of structural principles supporting the development of a socio-cultural space enriches the poetics of architectural space in a modern city. The emergence of subcultures generates numerous concepts as to the construction of the architectral world. As a result, a modern city can be interpreted as a "hypertext", i.e. a textual system featuring non-linear organization. The "hypertext" imparts stability of the image of a city, produced by it throughout the process of constant changes in the urban space and with increase in the velocity of these changes. This "hypertextual" image of the city brings together opposite structural principles of the cultural language - phonetic (the western type of writing) and the hieroglyphic (the eastern type of writing). The poetics of architectural compositions in the creation of "hypertextual" spaces of a modern city is based on the expansion of the spectrum of principles underlying the semantic perception of the world, whereby transformations of the spatial language of architecture take place and metaphores from the entire stock of symbols contained in the mythopoetic consciousness of humankind in the plastic language of architecture are used. What are the roles and functions of the architect in this situation: how he could carry out the task providing the comfortable human existence in "condensed", non-stable space, neither coming back to the sphere of technological utopia of neomodernism nor to the nostalgia of neoclassics?