What to do if the children have grown up but want to stay at the parents house. There are the once who rebuild the house or decide to build another storey. A third option is to build a new house next to the old one; a so called “Auszugshaus”. In the Austrian countryside this is a traditional way to deal with the change of generation. The younger generation stays in the old family home whereas the parents move into a smaller house. And that is what this family chose to do. A wooden pavillon was placed next to the old family home.
The new elegant pavillon is perfectly designed for the parents needs. Instead of single rooms the architects decided to create a small open loft. A sanitary box in the middle and two side rooms structure the building. Moveable elements enable different areas according to the current needs. Room-high windows allow a surrounding view into the garden and make the living area look even bigger. Accessibility of course is ensured.
The pavillon was prefabricated with high precession. Walls and floors are made of KHL panels. The surface is painted white on the inside and black on the outside. For the windows larch wood was chosen. The wide roof creates a sheltered outdoor area and protects the facade against sun and rain.
Can a building help stem the tide of large epidemics?
In 2010, in the midst of the world’s worst cholera outbreak in over a century, MASS Design Group was challenged to design a cholera treatment center where the construction process, as well as the finished building, could address the underlying structural and social conditions that allow cholera to thrive.
This is the subject of Design that Heals, a new documentary that portrays the challenges, innovations, and triumph of the project, proving that, “Architecture and health are inseparable.” (Dr. Jean-William Pape, GHESKIO founder)
The 31-minute film, an official New York 2016 Architecture and Design Film Festival selection, will premiere September 29th at 6:30 and October 1st and 7:30. Screenings will be held at Cinépolis Chelsea, 260 West 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011.
The film tries to answer how can we heal a community after a catastrophe by telling the story of Dr. Jean-William Pape, Haitian infectious disease specialist and Director and Founder of Les Centres GHESKIO, who has dedicated his career to combating diarrheal diseases that harm and kill Haiti’s poor.
In 2010, a large-scale earthquake devastated Haiti and its already weak public infrastructure. UN peacekeepers were brought in as part of the emergency response. Among them were soldiers from Nepal where cholera is endemic. Contaminated sewage from their camp leaked into water sources used for bathing and drinking. What ensued was one of the world’s worst cholera outbreaks in over a century.
Desperate to help, Les Centres GHESKIO set up and operated temporary cholera treatment tents for two years in order to care for the thousands who fell sick. The tents were miserably hot in the Haitian climate and difficult to keep sanitary. As the spread of cholera continued, GHESKIO realized that patient waste collected from tents being taken off site for treatment was actually being dumped back into the environment, contaminating groundwater and re-infecting people.
Dr. Pape worked with MASS Design Group to design a project that used the construction process to address the underlying structural and social conditions that allow cholera to thrive.
This documentary tells the story how GHESKIO and MASS Design Group invested both in long-term infrastructure and the Haitian people to heal the community.
Opening Night – September 28 General Admission – $20 Students – $15 September 29 – October 2 General Admission – $16.50 Student – $11.50
For a full list of Architecture and Design Film Festival screenings and events, visit the festival website, here.
Title: Design that Heals Documentary World Premiere
Design: Miguel Ángel Maure Blesa (Spain), Carlotta Franco (Italy), Arian Lehner (Austria), Javier Guerra Gómez (Spain)
Project Team: Alexsei Snetkov (Russia), Andrea Aleksic (Serbia), Andreas Daniel (Cyprus), Anna Brosalova (Russia), Ariane Etienne (France), Daria Kleymenicheva (Russia), Elena Ischimji (Moldova), Georgi Stoyanov (Bulgaria), Gintarė Petkevičiūtė (Germany), Hannah Dalton (England), Jack Vickerman (England), Mark Cauchi (Malta), Marton Peto (Hungary), Michael Hammerschick, (Austria), Oana Dăscăloiu (Romania), Tijana Škrivanek (Croatia)
The Living Boom is a public space on a pier in the Curonian lagoon of Lithuania, acting as a new enhancement to the public life of the city of Nida. Behind a 5-meter-high wooden wall “hides” an outdoor living room fitted with adapted local furniture from the Soviet era. The entire space of The Living Boom is painted in red, generating a unique public space in the middle of the natural attractions of the Curonian region.
Nida is one of the most popular summer vacation destinations of Lithuania, resulting in high touristic density in summer. During these months Nida’s existing public spaces are filled with visitors around the commercial areas of the city. The Living Boom therefore provides a public space, far off the busy, hectic scenes of the city and focuses on the main attraction of this region, it’s vast nature of lagoon, sand dunes and forest.
A pier is a dead end. How can one change the ‘end of this long path’ and celebrate its end as a new space? Being already set into boundaries on three sides by the element of water, the start of the project was to construct a fourth wall that creates a new space. As one walks along the pier, approaching the wall in the middle of the plain landscapes of lagoon and sand dunes, one yet has to find out what the space behind the wall offers. Only after physically walking through, one can see and grasp the new space, with furniture shining in red, generating an unseen space in the middle of water, sky, sand dunes and forest.
Plan
Elevation
Being five meters tall, the wall is the most striking element of the new public space. Built as a timber construction, fixed into the concrete floor by metallic bolts and planked with long thin wooden elements, the wall is generating the border between the in- and the outside of The Living Boom.
The space is fitted with local furniture from the Soviet era which have been adapted with new elements to allow further functions. This public space offers a three-meter-long table, multiple benches with different characters, a fireplace, a giant wooden chair as well as a traditional wind vane, which was handed to the workshop as a present from the municipality.
Throughout the past century, architecture’s relationship with water has developed along a variety of different paths. With his “Fallingwater” house, for example, the American master Frank Lloyd Wright confronted the dramatic flow of water with strong horizontal lines to heighten the experience of nature. Since then, architecture’s use of water has become more varied and complex. A space made almost purely of water emerged with Isamu Noguchi‘s design at the Osaka World Expo: glistening water appeared to fall from nowhere and glowed in the dark. Later with digitalization and fluid forms as design parameters, the focus shifted towards liquid architecture made of water and light. The interpretations have ranged from architectural forms modeled after literal drops of water, like Bernhard Franken´s visionary “Bubble” for BMW, to spectacular walk-in installations made of lines of water, transformed into pixels by light.
NOX fueled the discussion about the fluidity of water and light with their exhibition of real and virtual water at the Htwo0expo at Neeltje Jans, Netherlands, in 1997. Here, in a windowless and amorphous interior structure, Lars Spuybroek assigned the real water the role of being non-interactive, creating a sprayed mist that drained over the floors. As a counterpoint NOX introduced virtual water through interactive projections with sensors, which transformed wave patterns into ripples and blobs culminating in fascinating viewer experiences of water and light.
In contrast, the Iceland pavilion at Expo 2000 welcomed visitors with a water façade. Iceland, surrounded by water and boasting numerous spouting geysers on the island, presented a striking blue membrane cube in Hanover. A flowing film of water turned the pavilion into a cubic waterfall. With the sun shining on the cascading ripples and thereby reflecting the moving clouds, the façade generated a fresh and sparkling impression of the environment. In addition, the Icelandic pavilion revealed an artificial geyser in the interior, where guests could climb up a spiral ramp to admire the power of water. Thus the installation played with the a strong polarity of bright, brilliant falling water outside versus a dark geyser illuminated with stage lighting effects inside. After the Expo, the 28-meter-tall blue cube was recycled to present natural phenomena at the Universe amusement park in Nordborg, Denmark.
In comparison to the falling water theme at Hanover, the Swiss Expo in Yverdon-Les-Bains in 2002 gained international recognition with the remarkable “Blur Building” by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Fine mist from 35,000 high-pressure nozzles created an artificial cloud, which changed with the strength and direction of the wind, altering where the tourists could walk in order to explore the effect of an optical white out. By opening their mouths, the visitors could actually drink the building. After ascending to the deck, a view opened softly into the blue sky. In that way the architects confronted the public with extreme interplays of light and water, from a diffuse white in the inside to brilliant fine water droplets in the sun and ultimately colorful rainbow effects. After sunset, another image appeared when the architecture turned into a powerful and mystical luminous cloud on Lake Neuchâtel.
However, several other architects and artists have also explored the effects of light and water in a strictly controlled interior environment. The Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson tried to generate an image of freezing water drops in 2002. Deep down in the cellar of a former brewery, Eliasson benefited from a completely dark room as a black background at the Centre for International Light Art in Unna, Germany. Two parallel curtains of water frame a corridor made of water falling 5 meters to the ground. Due to bright strobe lights with a cold color temperature, the falling drops seem as if they are frozen. The mix of the loud sound of falling water droplets in the live space and the harsh contrast of white drops in a dark space definitely captivates the viewers.
Intrigued by digitalization, the MIT professor Carlo Ratti, together with his team at Carlo Ratti Associati and researchers from MIT Media Lab and MIT Senseable City Lab, created the “Digital Water Pavilion” for the Zaragoza Expo, Spain, in 2008. The digitally controlled water droplets enabled him to create two-dimensional patterns with water pixels, and to liquidate the traditional building wall. For visitors the curtain of water opened interactively, and the vertically moving curtain exposed a fascinating playful pattern. In the evening the illumination intensified the contrast of the bright falling curtain against the dark background.
Random International went beyond these two dimensional water curtains with their three-dimensional water installation “Rain Room” at the Barbican Centre in London in 2012. The visitor could actually walk through the falling water without getting wet, Thanks to a series of cameras which created a 3D-map of the presence and movement of visitors, a section of “dry pixels” was created in the Rain Room wherever there was a human presence. A bright spotlight at eye level at the end of the dark curving corridor attracted the viewers with a glaring light and sharply rendered all vertical lines of rain for an experiment that was rich in contrast.
When bringing the stroboscopic light effect, used by Eliasson in Unna, together with the constant illumination in the Rain Room by Random International, a new dimension of light experience emerges, where the water can transform from droplets into lines. DGT Architects used this approach in their rectangular installation “Luce Tempo Luogo” for the Toshiba Milano Salone in 2011. With an interval of seven microseconds they materialized a single point of light with water. However, over several minutes the viewers could follow the gradual transformation of water pixels into lines while the room changed from a dimly lit room to a space exclusively made of illuminated water. In 2015 DGT Architects adapted this concept to a circular layout for the “Light in Water” installation, as part of the exhibition “Lumière – The Play of Brilliants” in Paris. In addition, this project included a subtle light change regarding the color temperature, from a warm white to neutral white for the outer ring while the inner ring stayed constant in neutral white.
In comparison to the walk-in and self-contained installations by the artists and architects mentioned above, Shiro Takatani and the light artist Christian Partos regard the “3d Water Matrix” cube as a medium and not as a piece of art – comparable with the way a piano is a medium for the music it sends. The digitally controlled waterfall with a luminous ceiling enables numerous compositions in which the water pixels form lines, planes or amorphous volumes merging fluently from one graphical pattern to the next and thereby creating a dancing liquid sculpture. However, Takatani involved the frequency of light as another parameter for compiling patterns in his “ST/LL” work in 2015. Based on the light intervals of the field overhead he generated extraordinary images, where the liquid pixels seem to freeze in planes and volumes.
With the digitalization of falling water the element has relinquished its natural flow and ripples, and turned into sophisticated pixel patterns for liquid spaces. The response to the distinction of water pixels and non-pixel spaces has led to high-contrast installations of white droplets against black rooms. Consequently the fascination for digital process has extended to include light as well, with designers often preferring electrical light instead of natural daylight for its option of precise control. Due to the modulation of these droplets from pixels to falling vertical streams, attention has shifted from conventional light parameters like brightness or color temperature towards the timing and frequency of lighting. As the interplay of digital water pixels and digital light control has just started, we might therefore expect many more solutions for smart flying pixels which glow in the future.
Light matters, a monthly column on light and space, is written by Thomas Schielke. Based in Germany, he is fascinated by architectural lighting and works as an editor for the lighting company ERCO. He has published numerous articles and co-authored the books “Light Perspectives” and “SuperLux”. For more information check www.erco.com, www.arclighting.de or follow him @arcspaces.
The Caramão neighborhood in Lisbon, was built between 1940 and 1945 on the slope of Ajuda facing the Tagus and above the Restelo neighborhood.
Along with other social housing in Lisbon, such as Caselas, this neighborhood was designed to represent small villages that provided, in the style of adjustment, a similar type of life of the more humble part of society, to which they were accustomed to and also occupied at the date of its construction.
It is characterized by townhouses of two floors with about 40m2 each and two backyards. One in front, smaller, and the other in the back, that is, mostly, a good part of each plot.
Characterized by very small and compartmentalized spaces the main challenge of these houses is the adaptation to a contemporary experience and the need for larger spaces with a relationship with the outside.
The project was developed based on an organizational principle of hierarchically house, floors. Each floor corresponds to a particular program so that the areas could be exploited to the maximum, generating spaces with quality.
The organization and distribution of spaces was based on the idea of privacy and garden usage for the social spaces of the house.
Section
The project adapts the existing construction to a contemporary house respecting the morphology of the neighborhood and the characteristic front elevation.
The intervention is mainly made in the back of the house with the addition of a volume with 3 levels, which increases the area to the double.
On the ground floor of house after the entrance, we can find the living room, dining room and kitchen. A large and continuous space that leads you into the garden.
In the basement floor we can find a bathroom and an office open to a patio and in the upper level bedrooms and a bathroom also open to the patio.
Section
Opening yards, strategically placed inside the house, ensures the legally required areas, good lighting and privacy of the close and friendly neighbours.
CannonDesign and NEUF architect(e)s have unveiled the design for the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM), the largest healthcare construction project in North America and one of the largest current healthcare projects in the world, which has been in the works for almost a decade.
Spanning over 3 million square feet, the 22-story complex will merge three aging hospitals into one, creating a space with 772 single-bed patient rooms, 39 operating theaters, and more than 400 clinics and examination rooms.
Courtesy of CannonDesign
Now nearing completion of its first phase, the CHUM teaching hospital is also the largest public-private partnership (P3) healthcare project in Canadian history, set to revitalize an entire sector of Montréal’s urban core – explained the architects.
Courtesy of CannonDesign
Courtesy of CannonDesign
Through this first phase, the hospital’s core capabilities will become available, including all patient rooms, operating theaters, diagnostic and therapeutics, as well as the oncology program, thus leaving offices, a conference center, and ambulatory spaces for Phase 2.
Courtesy of CannonDesign
In order to break down the massive scale of the project, a public space component has been interwoven into the design to make it as open, transparent, and welcoming as possible. “Our team recognized the importance of creating a human experience that draws people in, to interact with the building in a variety of ways, without it feeling overbearing to visitors and patients. We wanted to completely redefine Montrealers’ image of what a hospital feels like” said Azad Chichmanian, partner, and architect with NEUF architect(e)s.
Courtesy of CannonDesign
The new CHUM campus will feature 13 large-scale works of art, far surpassing the Quebec government’s requirement of dedicating a minimum of 1% of a public development’s budget to the integration of art. Through these artworks, the hospital seeks to provide a “more human” experience for visitors and staff.
Courtesy of CannonDesign
CHUM has already won several awards, including an A’ Design Award in Italy, recognition at the Healthcare Design Forum in London, and a position as a finalist for the World Architecture Festival to be held in Berlin in November.
Urban Agency and OUALALOU+CHOI have drawn heavily from local inspiration for the design of a new adult education center in south-west Morocco. The isolated site is set against a harsh environmental backdrop, and in response the proposal only uses 10 000 of the allocated 22 000 square meters to create a compact building centered around an internal courtyard. This will allow it to be expanded upon in the future, as the building fulfills its intent as a world class education facility.
The project uses the traditional “Medersa” (first universities) as precedent, incorporating a dynamic internal courtyard and a simple exterior envelope. The Medersa, known for their “social, cultural and climatic ingenuity,” not only foster communal activity in their internal spaces but are protected from harsh sun, winds and sandstorms, creating a climatically controlled interior zone.
The interior courtyard and the open spaces adjacent to the university are densely planted to provide shading and reduce the impact of harsh northerly winds. The plantation strategy also assists with passive temperature control, as the hot air is filtered and cooled before it hits the building. Aside from its functional importance, the planting also assists the building in achieving the “magical ambient atmosphere” of a desert oasis.
Courtesy of Urban Agency
The program is arranged in a perimeter ring around the courtyard, with the teaching facilities at ground level and the accommodation on the first and second. The social and communal spaces, including an amphitheatre, restaurant, and a shop, protrude out within the courtyard as a series of large volumes. These interlink with the dominant courtyard, creating a series of smaller courtyards which the circulatory paths wind around, resembling the narrow streets of the Medina.
Courtesy of Urban Agency
In their press release, Urban Agency explain the importance of designing for an ageing building: In this particular project, ageing and weathering serve as a critical design tool for thinking about how the architecture might intercept with the changing state of the weather on site. The architectural expression of the building makes reference to the traditional local Berber architecture and more specifically to the “Kasbah” (ancient fortress) with its austere and solid monochrome exterior.
Those traditional structures have a sandy ochre yellow colour palette; the new training centre in turn is made from board marked concrete pigmented with local sand – a subtle and modern reinterpretation. The exterior finish is raw and horizontally patterned so that over time as the sand and dust from storms accumulates, they will highlight the patterns and embellish the building.
Courtesy of Urban Agency
In order to protect the inhabitants from this dust, the external envelope is relatively closed, also preventing excess solar gain. The interior climate is also controlled through natural ventilation strips which span the external faces, marking out the levels of the building. These strips express the horizontality of the building and further reference the open plains on which it lies.
The Design Matters Conference presented by the Association of Architecture Organizations is the world’s only dedicated annual meeting that seeks to bring top designers, journalists and civic leaders into exploratory dialogue with those not-for-profit professionals and volunteers charged with creating cultural programs (exhibitions, tours, lectures and symposia, festivals and films, youth outreach) to spur broader public interest in architecture and design.
If you’re involved with a not-for-profit architectural, design or educational institution, come join your peers at the Design Matters Conference and enjoy 2.5 days of workshops, presentations, tours and networking events.
Conference Schedule
Wednesday, November 2—Pre-Conference Day
12:30pm–2:00pm: Tour of Design Architecture Senior High (DASH) All Pre-Conference day participants are invited to tour DASH
2:30pm–5:00pm: A+DEN Workshop Host: Jennifer Masengarb, Chicago Architecture Foundation
2:30pm–5:00pm: International Directors Council Host: Peter Murray, New London Architecture
5:30pm–7:30pm: Opening Reception & Member Shorts AAO hosts cocktail reception for all Conference attendees at the de la Cruz Collection. We will also hear about projects from four of the Conference’s international delegates: “Scotland’s Urban Past” by Rebecca, Bailey, Historic Environment Scotland; “Countdown to the New DAC” by Tanya Lindkvist, Danish Architecture Center; and “Vocabulary of Hospitality” by Merve Bedir and Jason Hilgefort, Land+Civilization Compositions.
8:00pm: Dine-Arounds
Thursday, November 3—Conference Day One
Morning Sessions: Miami Center for Architecture and Design (MCAD)
8:30am: Registration Opens
9:00am–9:15am: Welcome Remarks
9:15am–10:00am: Opening Address “Miami Rising”: Manny Diaz, Former Mayor of Miami (2001–2009)
10:00am–10:30am: Coffee Break
10:45am-12:00pm: Morning Plenary “Shaping Cities and the Built Environment through Philanthropy”: Ron Bogle, American Architecture Foundation; Benjamin de la Peña, Knight Foundation; Stuart Kennedy, Miami Foundation; Elizabeth Lynn, van Beuren Charitable Foundation
12:00pm–1:15pm: Lunch
1:15pm: Buses depart MCAD to Miami Beach
Afternoon Sessions: Miami Design Preservation League (MDPL)
1:45pm–2:45pm: AAO Members Meeting Michael Wood, Association of Architecture Organizations
2:45pm-3:45pm: Connecting with AAO Membership: Notes from the Field A rapid pitch share out of innovative, inspired approaches by Conference delegates solving programming and management challenges old and new: “Crafting Center Identity” by Rick Bell, NYC Department of Design and Construction; “The Minnow & the Whale: Building Partnerships for Mutual Benefit” by Angela Kyle, PlayBuild; “No Small Plans” by Gabrielle Lyon, Chicago Architecture Foundation; “Curating the City: LGBTQ Historic Places in LA” by Adrian Fine, Los Angeles Conservancy; and “Peacebuilding through Design Thinking” by Maryam Eskandari, Harvard University & MIIM Designs LLC.
4:00pm–5:30pm: Walking Tour Art Deco Walking Tour
5:30pm: Buses depart MDPL to Miami
6:30pm-8:00pm: Evening Public Program “Resilience and Citizen Action”: Tom Dallessio, NextCity; Otis Rolley, Rockefeller Foundation; and Susanne Torriente, City of Miami Beach.
8:00pm: Dine-Arounds
Friday, November 4—Conference Day Two
Morning Location: Yve Hotel
8:00am: Breakfast
8:00am–9:00am: Resilient Miami Irvans Augustin, Urban Impact Lab; Gretchen Beesing, Catalyst Miami; Margie O’Driscoll, Bay Area Resilient by Design Challenge; Marta Viciedo, Urban Impact Lab. Rapid Pitch – “Resilient Boston: Architect to Student to Citizen”: Benjamin Peterson, Boston Architectural College; Gretchen Rabinkin, Boston Society of Architects & BSA Foundation.
9:30am–12:30pm: Tour Miami Beach Resiliency and Preservation Tour
Afternoon Location: HistoryMiami
1:15pm–2:00pm: Lunch
2:00pm–2:45pm: Tour of HistoryMiami Conference attendees will be treated to a brief tour of the museum and cultural complex designed by Philip Johnson (commissioned 1972; completed 1983). Free time will be allotted to browse the museum’s upcoming exhibition, The Discipline of Nature: Architect Alfred Browning Parker in Florida.
3:00pm–4:00pm: Afternoon Plenary “Diversity & Cultural Production in Miami”: Meg Daly, Friends of the Underline; Cheryl Jacobs, Miami Center for Architecture & Design; George Neary, Associate Vice President of Cultural Tourism for the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau; Mikhaile Solomon, Founding Director, Prizm Art Fair
4:00pm–5:00pm: Afternoon Plenary “Miami as a Hub for Design”: Cheryl Jacobs, Miami Center for Architecture & Design; Avra Jain, Vagabond Group; Jessica Goldman Srebnick, Goldman Properties
5:00pm: Buses depart for Wynwood neighborhood
5:30pm–6:00pm: Tour Wynwood Walking Tour
6:30pm–8:30pm: Closing Party at R+HOUSE
For the full schedule, including further information about each event, see here.
Title: 2016 Design Matters Conference presented by the Association of Architecture Organizations
This project of sustainable house is located in the protected landscape area Nature 2000, surrounded by beech and oak forests, horse riding meadows and agricultural lands.
Courtesy of BXBstudio
Number of analysises defined the final shape of the house, among them: – analysis of functional plan – division into day, night, technical and working zones, – analysis of solar radiation – to optimize solar gain and to create interiors with proper natural light, – analysis of exterior views and plot shape – to take the most advantage of the house location, – building technology to be used
Courtesy of BXBstudio
The house in not huge, but there is a spacious day zone inside, that is open up to 5 m height. Its main pride is a conrete wall and bearing mounting stairs.
Plan
Plan
The building is designed in way to optimize the energy gain and loss. Sustainability of the house comes not only from unique technology but also out of architectural form and shape that harmonizes with nature.
Courtesy of BXBstudio
Diagram
Courtesy of BXBstudio
Simulations of the sun positions in different periods of a year allowed to create proper arrangement of the house layout and glass partition in way to gain heat in winter and to reduce overwheating in summer. Energy efficient Izodom technology was used to minimize heat loss.
With the rise of computational networks and power, cognitive models developed and debated over in the postwar decades have finally been able to be put to work. Back then, there was a philosophical debate raging alongside the burgeoning field of computer science theory on the nature of consciousness, in which machines of artificial intelligence served as a thought experiment to question humanity. Yet with the proliferation of data and the centralization of its archives, theoretical practice moved from conceptual experiments to empirical tests.
The shift is decisive, as along with it moved the criteria of philosophical judgment from abstract reason to pragmatic conjecture. Machines of models of artificial intelligence are still put to the test, but evaluated according to their results, not logical consistency or rationality. Artificial intelligence is both a theory and a practice, which respectively evolved at different times and speeds. The ability to test artificial intelligence has only become recently possible thanks to the internet, which serves as is its prime laboratory and space of experimentation. But increasingly, artificial intelligence is leaving the web, crossing the digital divide, and being applied to cities and the environment.
There are many analogies that can be drawn today between computers and cities. This formal similarity, as rough as it may be, has allowed network-based logics to begin to shape urban development and the way we (want to) live. Logistics is the general term for such processes. Computers stand apart in the history of machines in the sense that it’s not so much a tool as it is a toolbox, one whose contents can be invented with relative freedom and lack of constraint. It’s for all of these reasons that artificial intelligence is resistant to our critical faculties. It’s not so much that we don’t understand it, but paradoxically, it’s that we finally can. Artificial intelligence is real. It’s not the perfect model of consciousness we thought we were aiming for, but it’s close enough.
It’s hard to comprehend the potential impact of artificial intelligence. As a system in need of deployment, AI is plagued by scale and ‘boundary issues’. Take basic income, for instance, which often accompanies recent calls for automation. Small scale tests are currently being developed and rolled out in certain places around the globe, the Dutch city of Utrecht being one of the largest.[1] Yet as soon as the decision needs to be made of who gets it and who doesn’t – be it only nationals, residents, inhabitants, or whatever – a certain political violence needs to be exacted that undermines the rationale behind the effort and the scientific value of its results. Basic income really only works if its universal.[2]
Self-driving cars are another ‘prime’ example of boundary issues facing artificial intelligence. While early public demos and private tests were on closed circuits or even set tracks, tests have begun in ‘dynamic’ urban environments. Last month, Uber reportedly rolled out its first fleet of self-driving vehicles in downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for an indefinite period (notably, most trials are finite).[3] Yet even before live road tests became a thing, a humbling revelation dawned about the challenges facing the successful implementation of such systems into our cities, our landscapes, and our daily lives: we are the problem. Or in other words, the problem of tomorrow is today.
Left to their own devices, self-driving cars hold immense promise to radically transform urban mobility patterns and upheave the cultures and economies that support them towards more sustainable and equitable ends. But beyond a debate over whether we should be conservative or liberal with the values and practices currently in place today, self-driving cars probe more a fundamental human anxiety about the degree of trust and responsibility we place in the machines we live with. An easy way to wash this problem away is to fabricate a boundary: if we were to remove all other things from the space in which the system is ‘live’ – non-self-driving cars and pedestrians, for example – at least some of this risk would be ameliorated, if not eliminated altogether.
Like most ‘problems’ though, the challenges facing the future of AI are not as simple as erecting a wall. Hybridity is a fundamental problem, yes, but if we were to assume it to be the only one, the future itself would be subsumed and lost within the desire for a very particular kind of progress. Artificial intelligence has given rise to what has come to be known as ‘existential risk’ insofar as it throws humanity itself into question, much like its early models questioned what it meant to be human.[4] AI stands to rewrite the logic by which we have relation with the support systems our lives depend upon. AI is predicated by ‘locking in’ a political cosmology of actors and the rights distributed to them. AI writes politics with code, yet increasingly into stone and the flesh as well.
By throwing it into question, systems of artificial intelligence such as self-driving cars allow us to reflect upon some of the most fundamental questions of humanity, like: not whether to kill or not, but which life to take in in situations where death is unavoidable.[5] Death has always been factored into infrastructure as a negative externality, and design has responded accordingly. Road barriers prevent people from crossing the highway, for example. But how does one implement a safety feature, emergency airbags for instance, in artificial intelligence? Profanity filters – basic script libraries easily drawn in to any chatbot program – are only applicable to so few cases.[6]
Artificial intelligence has finally begun to develop according to models not based on the human brain. Perhaps for this very reason, yet despite the fact that we have perhaps never had such a refined and deep understanding of it, there is great fear over our ability to control artificial intelligence. Accidents and mistakes do and will happen, and while we can be careful, we can’t really predict what will happen when AI systems go ‘live’, and especially not in increasingly large, complex, and fundamental domains. Yet we can speculate and think what we would want to happen in innumerous instances. The anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence are thus not necessarily about control per se, but rather our ability to respond to what the future brings (with or without the help of AI, I might add).
The technologies we use on a daily, hourly basis frame our relation to the world and our experience of it. This is nothing particularly new. We design machines, and machines design us. By using them we change ourselves. Yet today, machines are learning to change themselves based on how we use them. This is where that devilish concept of ‘intention’ comes in. Life is messy; unpredictable and dangerous, filled with sentiment. Social engineering has haunted the dreams of visionaries since the rise of the Soviet state, but never before have the potentials to engineer life’s folds been so great. The machines are not coming; they’re already here. We need to learn about machines because we learn from machines, because we make machines. We need to understand the power and potential they have in order to better form an idea of what we want to do with them, what we want them to do, and what we want them to do to us.
References [1] Tracy Brown Hamilton, ‘The Netherlands’ Upcoming Money-for-Nothing Experiment’, The Atlantic, 21 June 2016. (accessed 26 August 2016). [2] Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015). [3] Max Chafkin, ‘Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet Arrives in Pittsburgh This Month’, Bloomberg Businessweek, 18 August 2016. (accessed 21 August 2016). [4] Raffi Khatchadourian, ‘The Doomsday Invention’, The New Yorker, 23 November 2015. (accessed 25 August 2016). [5] Iyad Rahwan, Jean-Francois Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, et. al, ‘Moral Machine’, Scalable Cooperation, MIT Media Lab. (accessed 21 August 2016). [6] Peter Lee, ‘Learning from Tay’s introduction’, Official Microsoft Blog, 25 March 2016. (accessed 21 August 2016).
Volume is an independent quarterly magazine that sets the agenda for architecture and design. With going beyond architecture’s definition of ‘making buildings’ it reaches out for global views on designing environments, advocates broader attitudes to social structures, and reclaims the cultural and political significance of architecture. Created as a global idea platform to voice architecture any way, anywhere, anytime, it represents the expansion of architectural territories and the new mandate for design.
Sig Nordal 