Towards embedding high-resolution intelligence into the built environment

Abstract

Prevailing architectural design paradigms, identified as those informed by historically conservative positions and methods, are incompatible with the intelligent built-environment discourse.
Two core considerations inform this assessment. The first asserts that such paradigms produce spaces and programmatic distributions in terms of discrete, precisely delimited, and artificially ordered static partitions. The second asserts that said paradigms preclude (at best) or exclude (at worst) discussions of technological intelligence from the early stages of the design process, thereby negating the possibility of imbuing the built-environment with inherent intelligence. The rigidity expressed in the first consideration, and the disregard for technological intelligence expressed in the second, produce very low-resolution and -adaptability architectures. As a result, occupants are compelled to conform to their built-environment rather than the expected vice versa, as it is fundamentally incapable of actively, reactively, and interactively promoting
their well-being. In this paper, two key positions (i.e., high resolution space and high resolution intelligence) motivated by the above considerations are promoted as part of a fundamentally different design paradigm, one expressly geared towards personalization, interaction, and intelligence in a parametrically fluid and self-adapting built-environment capable of intuitive physical, spatial, and computational feedback-loops.