Disruptive Technologies: The Convergence of New Paradigms in Architecture

Robotic systems are increasingly incorporated into building processes and buildings. The question for the future is thus not if but how robotic systems will be integrated into architecture and the built environment. Such systems have a major impact due to the convergence of multiple technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), large-scale machine-to-machine and human-to-machine communication (M2M and H2M), and the Internet of Things (IoT). Implications are explored and presented in this section in relationship to historical and theoretical interpretations and current manifestations by presenting ongoing research implemented at institutions such as McGill and Cornell Universities from North America, Technical University Delft from Europe, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong from Asia.

The notion of “adaptiveness” is theoretically and technically entangled with the concept of “fit.” That is, theories and practices of adaptive architecture variously propose processes through which a physical structure with embedded computing capabilities transforms to “fit” a changing context. Aiming to activate the notion of “fit” as a multivalent and contested concept and to illuminate its ties to the techniques enlisted to fulfill it, this paper examines three germinal experiments from early research on architecture and computation. It focuses on the divergent ways that these experiments defined the system boundaries between “structure” and “context” and on the contingency of these boundaries on specific mathematical and calculative techniques. The paper begins with efforts to match patterns of spatial organization with patterns of human activity through graphs and electrical network analogies, which I argue generated an imagination of architectural form as agile and transformable by external organizational structures. From these attempts to calculate “good fit,” the paper moves to the notion of “misfit” as a guiding principle for systematic design processes that professed to preserve architecture and its context as an indivisible “ensemble.” I focus on the mathematical representations of this “ensemble” and their implications for conceptualizing time and dynamic phenomena. Finally, the paper discusses attempts to theorize and implement an “evolutionary fit” as the result of a “conversation” between human agents and an “intelligent” surround that is capable of movement and active transformation. The paper frames these experiments as episodes in architects’ engagement with a topological imagination of design, in which invariant mathematical scaffolds become not only enablers, but also inhibitors, of an open-ended and nimble conception of architectural environments.

In this paper, the authors report on user preferences for different interaction modes from pushbuttons to AI when interacting with robot surfaces—malleable, adaptive, and physical surfaces that spatially reconfigure interior spaces within the built environment. With global mass urbanization, micro-homes and offices are proliferating; we envision the utility of robot surfaces in reconfiguring compact space into “many spaces” supporting and augmenting human activity. Users in a lab study (N = 12) were asked to consider robot surfaces of our design, used in conjunction with common design tasks performed in a micro-office—specifically, which interaction modes were preferred at five key instances (we call them “scenarios”) over the duration of the task. We found that, for the five scenarios, participants’ preferences were split between AI-controlled and user-controlled interactions because of the contexts of different scenarios and the complexity, accuracy, discreetness, and feedback speed of different interaction modes. Our research informs the design of increasingly architectural and spatial human-AI interactions in everyday life.

With current advancements in Cyber-physical Systems (CpS), data-driven design to both production and operation processes has been increasingly incorporating aspects of robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). These aspects are the focus of architectural exploration implemented in the Robotic Building lab at Technical University (TU) Delft using Design-to-Robotic-Production and -Operation (D2RP&O) methods. In the presented project implemented in collaboration with the Landscape Architecture and Informatics departments from TU Delft and the University of Fribourg, respectively, new habitats are developed for various animal and plant species by introducing small-scale interventions in residual space. The intention for these inserts is to support biodiversity by engaging humans in interaction with them and each other. In this context, the inserts are not only produced by computational and robotic means, but they also contain sensor–actuator mechanisms that allow humans to interact with them by establishing bio-cyber-physical feedback loops. The aim is to identify the challenges and potential of such systems to improve spatial experience, increase social interaction, as well as support biodiversity, in urban environments.

The embedding of sensing and actuating technologies in the built environment opens up radical new scenarios for the design and management of cities. It has given rise to a range of new urban research and ‘smart city’ initiatives, emerging as part of new interdisciplinary urban sciences based on data generated by urban residents. The monitoring of people’s location data, movement and activity patterns could inform a more evidence-based planning approach to urban development, but the digital analysis of user behaviours over time also raises ethical questions regarding privacy, participation and the methods of data interpretation. This book chapter presents a series of theoretical and procedural experiments conducted through academic research and teaching, exploring the potential methods and consequences of a data-driven integration of urban analytics and generative design. Firstly, the concept of participatory urban design enabled by cybernetic feedback loops, developed in the 1970s by Negroponte, Friedman and Pask, is connected to the contemporary theoretical framework of placemaking, focusing on processes of environmental and social behaviours, and relationships. Subsequently, a series of on-site experiments are discussed in which the principles of placemaking are quantified and structured into computational generative design processes. Lastly, current research developments are discussed in which the notions of data-driven research into placemaking are interpreted within the context of applied research and urban design implementation scenarios. Through a discussion of the separate processes for gathering, analysing, translating and implementing data, their potential combination into an integrated workflow is demonstrated. As this new approach towards data-driven design can be conceptualised in relation to the politics of urban space, we explore how urban designers, operating at the intersection between social sciences and technology, can engage with new conceptual and practical methodologies to deliver more resilient, liveable and participatory urban spaces.

While it was referred to as postmodern (Lyotard 1979), from the 1960s until around the end of the 1990s, the information society was still often treated as a modern society in which the service sector would have taken precedence over the manufacturing and material goods circulating according to a new logic of networks (Castells 1996–1998) which also governed human relations, relations of power or simple relations of friendship. In line with its original name given by its creator Claude Shannon (Shannon 1948)—a (mathematical) “theory of communication”—this information society was also named the communication society. In architecture, this communicational aspect was confirmed by Robert Venturi who affirmed that “modern architecture is about space, postmodern architecture is about communication” (Venturi 1996). Although no one can deny the current importance of the communication phenomenon, we would nevertheless be wrong to limit ourselves to it. Our world, in fact, is at the same time informational, communicational, and computational and it is indeed this triple nature that is an urgent question today.

As design disciplines increasingly engage with Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and Neural Networks, architects must learn how to negotiate between the radical abstractions of automatic algorithmic procedures and their practical application to design processes. The challenge for architects is both profound and lasting as the penetration of learning algorithms will fundamentally change how space is conceptualised and intervened in. The challenge of architectural theory is to develop instruments to navigate the new, uncharted domain of data and learning algorithms. The paper proposes a cryptographic approach to design which develops ideas and instruments for the interaction between humans and the complex, noisy, ‘alien’ domain of learning algorithms. Through the lens of cryptography, it will be possible to sketch out key references, theories and examples of how architects could begin to conceptualise the use of learning algorithms in design. The complexity and cultural richness embedded in the project of the automation of thought—which underpins the mechanics of learning algorithms—cannot be exhausted by technical literature only. Learning algorithms pose more complex and conceptual challenges as they suggest a radical reorganisation of space and scale. The furnishing of both the physical and algorithmic space will emerge from the entanglement of architectural ideas, mathematics, and logic which together can conjure up a fertile ground for speculative thinking. What ideas and instruments can be called up or invented to tune these two types of spaces when we design with learning algorithms? The discussion will be supported by some examples of design of urban public spaces. This work is part of the design research carried out in Research Cluster 14 by the design studio I have been running with Dr. Tasos Varoudis and Eirini Tsouknida (in 2021–22) in the Master in Urban Design at the B-Pro at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

What does it mean for humans or machines to read architecture? The concept of legibility, long a subject of interest and debate in theories of architectural representation, is taking on new valences with the advent of computer vision and artificial intelligence. This paper situates the new dimensions of legibility within the historical context of architectural debates concerning the reading of buildings on the one hand and the technological evolution of machine readability on the other. A series of contemporary case studies of architecture enabled by machine vision reveals the current mutations of legibility at the intersection of human and machine perception.

Only two decades into the twenty-first century, the disciplinary tapestry of architectural education, woven by deeply engrained values, institutional structures, long-resistant cultural practices, and shape-shifting yet continuous traditions is already confronting an unprecedented set of disruptions. While certain institutions undertake cutting-edge explorations in the field, and every architecture school is being inevitably immersed into digital culture (the pandemic made the final stroke), there are pending disciplinary, cultural, and methodological questions on what new forms of intelligence, labor, creativity, and reorganization of space, knowledge, and resources have to offer for architectural learning. More so, the social and climatic urgencies compel architectural education to radically reconsider a new pedagogic agenda in the age of big data, AI, and the Anthropocene. This article proposes to outline trajectories for this agenda, by raising a series of questions regarding architectural learning and the role of institutions in the twenty-first century. Some of these questions are new, and many date back to the institutional foundations of architectural education that call for a revision as digital culture and the impacts of the Anthropocene advance at unprecedented speed.

When we look at recent changes in architecture, let's say the last 50 years, between 1972 and 2022, the characteristic that strikes us most is the gap between the architecture commonly built in 1972—including its modes of practice that we would call today “business models”—and that built in the last decade.

After 30 years of theoretical speculation and advances in gaming and entertainment, the internet is finally on the way to transforming into cyberspace. The magazine as guiding analogy for the web is being overtaken by the analogy of the city. Architects take over from graphic designers. The premise for the plausibility of this takeover and expansion of architecture’s competency is that all design, including architecture, is communicative framing. The thesis of this paper is that in this age of soaring web-based telecommunication the space of social communication must be designed simultaneously as a physical and virtual realm, as cyber-urban space, seamlessly integrating physically immediate and digitally mediated communicative interactions, constituting a new augmented mixed reality.

A so-called Spatial Technology Stack (STS), that unifies Architectural Geometry and game-tech can robustly support the

A technological thesis associated with these observations is that STS can provide, in comparison to the ubiquitous but misaligned Building information Modelling technologies, an alternative high-performance technological basis for engaging and responsible design, both online and on-land. We will argue that STS is better aligned with the cultural production view of architecture, spatial user-experience (UX) design and end-user ergonomics, integrated design and construction and the ecological benefits thereof, and the game-tech powering the metaverse.

Although architecture has always been dependent on the evolution of techniques, it was only with the industrial revolution that technique became the determining criterion in its evolution. We will even find, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many entrepreneurial initiatives by architects articulated solely around specific technical innovations. However, while in each field of activity technology seems more significant than ever, neither technique nor technology can ensure the success of a company or the deployment of innovation on its own. Indeed, this success in many cases depends on innovations in the field of business, innovations that are as important or even more important than those leading to disruptive technology. Returning, among other notions, to those of disruptive and radical innovations, this chapter recalls the importance, for contemporary architecture, of considering all the parameters that influence the transformation of our environment, and not the only technological parameter incapable on its own of leading to beneficial transformations of our environment.