The Future of Architecture - Spontaneous and Virtual
Patrik Schumacher, London 2020

Published in: Economic Times, Insights - Reimagining Business, India

The built environment must progress in step with progress of society. It is therefore the task of the avant-garde segment of the academic discipline and profession of architecture to theorize and explore how best to guide the development of the built environment in ways that are congenial to the opportunities and challenges of societal development at the frontier of progress. What characterizes recent and current socio-economic transformations is the shift from an economy based on mechanical mass production to an economy based on robotic fabrication and web-based services that allow for much higher rates of innovation.

The new reprogrammable robotic production technologies can absorb an unlimited number of innovations and therefore allows all workers to become self-directed creative innovators. There is no technical or cost limitations in uploading new improved apps to millions of users every minute, or to feed 3D printers with new improved instructions. Also, robotic assempby lines no longer lock workers into routine work. All are set free to innovate. This means that most work will become creative, in science, R&D, marketing, finance, education etc.

This implies a new level of urban concentration in knowledge-based creative industry hubs with a much higher degree of complexity and dynamism in the social life process and thus also in the urban and architectural development. This socio-economic shift from Fordism to Postfordism finds it congenial architectural response in the paradigm shift from Modernism to Parametricism as the epochal style for the 21st century.

The spaces Zaha Hadid Architects created within the paradigm of parametricism express and facilitate the complexity, dynamism and communicative intensification of urban life in our 21st Century Network Society. In our designs buildings become porous and urbanised on the inside, allowing for increasing inter-visibility between the diverse social activities brought together, to facilitate browsing navigation and to maximize co-location synergies. The built environment becomes an information-rich, empowering and exhiliarating 360 degree interface of communication and experience machine. Lose yourself and discover yourself!

This image is a collage of 16 images (14 photos and 2 renderings) depicting spaces
designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, in different cities around the world.

The unprecedented level of dynamism in social interaction processes in contemporary creative industry work environments calls for adaptive, responsive and indeed creative built environments. The discourse of so called ‘intelligent buildings’ has to be radicalized and related to the core competency of architectural design, namely the ordering of social interactions. If these patterns of interaction become increasingly variable, this implies the demand for an unprecedented level of real time spatial flexibility. This demand can only be met by perceptive and responsive environments. However, the next step here are truly intelligent, creative environments that operate in a self-directed fashion rather than merely responding in routine ways or waiting for instructions. The architectural elements meant to facilitate increasingly complex and dynamic pattern of interaction must become congenial participants in the collective life process. Just as a contemporary tech firm needs self-directed collaborators that develop their own initiatives rather than employees waiting for instructions, so will a future work environment look for robotic agents that do not wait for being remote controlled but are self-acting and learning to maximize their usefulness.

The scene is set, within contemporary advanced work environments, for the architectural instrumentalization of the artistic experiments with interactive art installations, powered by the new easy availability of sensor and actuator technologies. Doors, windows, blinds, partitions, screens, tables, desks, chairs, lighting devices etc. will all become self-directed agents, with a life-long machine learning curve, steered by the prerogative of maximising their inbuilt utility functions that guide then to be utilized and thus useful in the social communication process. This is the concept of spontaneously intelligent environments.

In our post-covid-19 world these work environments will have to be seamlessly connected up with the virtual communication spaces for those who will participate remotely rather than via physical co-presence. Our physical spaces will afford windows into virtual spaces where the logic of gathering and communicating is similar. We will increasingly see mixed meetings where multiple real and multiple virtual participants join a single communication event. The design of these virtual communication spaces will increasingly become the domain of architects rather than of mere graphic designers.

All the design disciplines, from urban design and architecture to fashion and graphic design, form a unified discourse and practice with a unity of purpose: the sensuous framing of communicative social interaction. This also includes all telecommunications. Here too our colleagues’ framing design work is always involved.
The internet started in the early 1990s and some of us architects imagined that the internet would develop into a virtual three-dimensional navigation and communication cyberspace. The design studio I was teaching at TU Berlin in 1995 was exploring this idea under the heading ‘Virtual College’: Online learning as collective experience facilitated within a virtual architecture. However, the internet became a magazine-like medium instead, the preserve of graphic designers rather than architects. This will change now.

The world after Covid-19 should be designed as a virtual four-dimensional navigation and communication space, as cyberspace. This is where a lot of the architectural action and innovation will be happening in the coming period. Any design project in this space involves all of the three parts of the architect’s project I have distinguished in my theory of architecture: the organisational project, the phenomenological project and the semiological project. The semiological project is crucial: While all urban spaces are never only mere physical containers that carry and channel bodies but always already also information-rich navigation and interaction spaces, this information-rich communicative charge and capacity is the very essence of all cyberspaces. It is this crucial semiological project that I have concentrated on, that I have theorized, explored and designed within the framework of the AA Design Research Lab and in other research arenas for the last 10 years. I know how to design architectural projects, real or virtual, together with a grammar empowered spatio-visual language, with a much enhanced communicative capacity and I know how to craft dense, navigable and legible information-rich environments for multiply layered societal interaction forms, purposes and audiences. The only thing that is missing are the entrepreneurial clients who understand what could emerge and flourish now.

In both the real and virtual spaces ai-empowered creatures will, more and more, become our valued collaborators. To the extent that such entities accumulate experiences and evolve unique skills and knowledges due to their individual histories, they become irreplaceable and thus precious, like individual persons. The life-process of the future will thus become a man-machine ecology, with many productive human personalities and many more productive machine or system personalities.

End

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