Reprinted from the exhibition guidebook for Toward the Sentient City

Over the past several years, as the Architectural League has become increasingly involved in exploring the proliferation of various types of ambient, mobile, and ubiquitous computer technologies, we have often been asked, what does this have to do with architecture? For many, it is a leap of the imagination to think that a microprocessor the size of your fingertip, or the mobile phone in your pocket, can meaningfully affect the shape of the room you’re sitting in, let alone a city’s skyline. At a moment when new digital technologies seem to be dematerializing more and more of the world around us (think books, CDs, photographs), what impact can they possibly have on the insistent materiality of buildings and cities?

According to Nicholas Carr, author and the former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, the advent of the electrical grid in the nineteenth century may offer parallels for understanding the possible implications of the technological revolution we are currently experiencing. In The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google, Carr argues that while the nation’s grid was initially developed primarily as a means to provide safe and accessible power to industry, it set off a chain reaction of unintended consequences that ultimately transformed American society. “The rise of the middle class, the expansion of public education, the flowering of mass culture, the movement of the population to the suburbs, the shift from an industrial to a service economy,” Carr argues, “None of these would have happened without the cheap current generated by utilities.” And all of these were reflected in equally radical transformations in the built environment.

We are now on the cusp of a similarly fundamental reconfiguration of physical space, one in which a vast and mostly invisible layer of technology is being embedded into the world around us. Using a wide range of complex technologies and devices — from microprocessors and electronic identification tags to sensors and networked information systems — buildings and cities are being transformed, imbued with the capacity to sense, record, process, transmit, and respond to information and activity taking place within and around them. Of course, predictions
for a future “smart” city have been floating around for decades, and we are all familiar with the false starts and wrong turns. What makes this moment unlike any before, however, is that for the first time the decreasing cost of the hardware and the increasing computational power of the software have converged so that it is now feasible to embed enormously powerful digital intelligence and processing capability into any object or space of our choosing. If experience has taught us anything, it is that new technologies get integrated into the existing built fabric in complex and unexpected ways, and that the forms they take have an enormous effect on daily life and social relations. A “sentient” city will be a future reality. The questions now are: what will it look like, how will it work, and who will benefit from it?

Toward the Sentient City, curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League, is intended to serve as both demonstration and provocation for thinking about alternative ways to answer these and other questions. It is also intended to bring architects and urban designers into
a conversation that until now has been dominated by technologists. That these technologies will continue to permeate our lives is inevitable. The possibilities for integrating the disparate parts of our lives into a networked whole, for increasing safety and security, for off-setting environmental degradation, are too great to forego — and the potential for economic gain will be too seductive to resist. We should not let the technology (or the terminology) mislead us into thinking that these are issues relevant, and accessible, only to the technorati. What we are talking about is nothing short of a complete reorientation of our relationship to the built environment. Architects and urban designers must insert themselves now into the discussion of how these technologies are conceptualized and deployed, or risk being sidelined as our future environment takes shape.

–Gregory Wessner, Digital Programs and Exhibitions Director