How Google Earth Is Transforming Architecture

"....consider one of the most dramatic shifts to hit the architecture world in decades: the growing prominence of the roof — and, perhaps more important, the top-down perspective that exposes it to view — in the design of buildings, neighborhoods and even whole cities.

Thanks in part to the surging popularity of Google Earth and other Web-based programs, which give the public a bracingly new, if detached, way to interact with the built environment, rooftops are shedding their reputation as forgotten, wind-swept corners of the urban landscape and moving toward the center of architectural practice...Environmentally minded firms are making dramatic use of green roofs....Using satellite images and aerial photographs [Google Earth and its competitors] have enabled a new kind of architectural tourism..."

Architects say the influence of the bird's-eye view seems to grow by the week. Clients arrive for preliminary meetings having studied overhead views of their building sites on the Internet. And if you sit in on thesis reviews at an architecture school these days, chances are quite good that a student presentation will begin with an image from Google Earth or another online source.

Google Earth...may tempt architects to play to their growing virtual audience at the expense of a building's day-to-day users, creating new architectural icons designed to look striking not from the sidewalk but from above, on a computer screen."