What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT.
Architectural practice naturally results in an extraordinary accumulation of visuals and archival media that demand sorting, cataloguing, and organizing at a certain moment in time in order to avoid their amorphous accumulation to invade the working order of a firm. Tagging, numbering and classifying the accumulated traces of architectural creativity and data, has become a way of organizing the log of creative options and scenarios developed in practice, a directory of successful examples and of failures, all arranged to be used as a self-referential working catalogue of options that may be mobilized at any moment in time.
The last three decades have seen a very conscious effort by architectural practices to consider archives. As the computer entered the world of design practice, many architects have developed new awareness and concern about their legacy. We witness the first traces of this process unfolding in the 1990s and intensifying the “impulse” of archiving. Offices and large firms have begun investing effort in appointing PRs and archivists to organize and catalogue their archives systematically. At the same time, the emergence and proliferation of the digital, from digital photography to the development of new software, has radically altered architectural practice. The evolution of technology has also hybridized the conceptual system of the architectural archive. Old floppy disks, 3D printers, physical models of different sorts, plans, prints, sketches and correspondence have all filled the archival boxes of contemporary architectural practices presenting us with curious and dazzling mixtures. Contrary to what some theorists say, that architects are “singularly adept in erasing their past” (Lathrop 1996), the new technological condition of a city with “multiple eyes” will outline a situation in which architects will have to preciously preserve the traces of the recent past and will increasingly become more attentive to archiving. The new conditions of architectural practice will imply new technologies of archivization that will gradually become a pervasive method of regulating the production of efficiency in practice.
