“Can you help me design my residential tower? It's 30 stories and located in Brooklyn, New York.” ChatGPT’s response may be surprising. Given that the bot has no architectural experience, and is certainly not a licensed architect, it was quick to rattle off a list of considerations for my building. Zoning codes, floor plan functionality, building codes, materiality, structural design, amenity spaces, and sustainable measures were just a few of the topics ChatGPT shared information about.
Envision your ideal neighborhood. Maybe it’s on a cul-de-sac in the suburbs, where every neighbor has a well-manicured lawn, a two-car garage, and everyone gives each other a friendly wave on their way to work. Or maybe you live in a high-rise building in a dense urban center, where you take public transit to the office five days a week and say hello to your doorman on your way out. Whatever your neighborhood might look like, there’s always a sense of wanting to know the people who live around your- or at least an unspoken reliance on one another to ensure that your surroundings are safe. What happens when technology brings you and your neighbors together to report on local happenings? Is it a good thing, or does it create a vigilante situation gone awry?
The Power of Data is an exhibition created in a virtual building, conceived by three-dimensional geometries based on various artificial intelligence algorithms. The project was created by the OLA (Online Lab of Architecture) team of research architects formed by Jennifer Durand (Peru), Daniel Escobar (Colombia), Claudia Garcia (Spain), Giovanna Pillaca (Peru) and Jose Luis Vintimilla (Ecuador).
Intro GPS systems and Location Based Services give access to an important amount of data that is currently being used mostly for traffic analysis - but which, if properly processed, could open up infinite possibilities for planning.The access to these Mobility Big Data is no longer a privilege of large cities; on the contrary, it is possible to effectively apply the technologies to increasingly more diverse territories, from mega-regions to contained districts and cities. These data, when retrospectively compared to previously collected ones, lend themselves to multiple applications loosely related to the traffic issue, such as socio-demographic or economical studies. Systematica opens the doors of its laboratory to show us what are the potentials and limits of these tools, starting from a direct experience - a research project, developed in the Los Angeles area.
For the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," (21 December 2019-8 March 2020) ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies might impact architecture and urban life. The contribution below is part of a series of scientific essays selected through the “Eyes of the City” call for papers, launched in preparation of the exhibitions: international scholars were asked to send their reflection in reaction to the statement by the curators Carlo Ratti Associati, Politecnico di Torino and SCUT, which you can read here.
Big Data refers to data that, due to its quantity and complexity, requires specific applications in order to be processed. New trends in urbanism, data collection, and management, not to mention the development of new platforms and tools, have given rise to a new era in urban analysis, creating new resources to understand, evaluate, and manage the evolution of cities.
In the highly connected world we live in, technology influences and impacts almost every decision we make. Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) have enhanced our connected world and helped us understand more about the spaces we inhabit. Aside from the smart homes and smart appliances we have become accustomed to, the modern day office is being redesigned and reprogrammed to include a variety of smart technology systems. The goal of these systems is to put our offices to work and empower businesses to better understand their design decisions, real estate investments, and most importantly- their own employees.
Regardless of where you live or work or who you’re friends with, you usually move around the same neighbourhoods and streets of your city. It may be London, Santiago, Shanghai, or Moscow, but in any of these places, there are always districts you have never set a foot in. Have you ever considered how many ‘cities’ are within your own city?
A research article published in The Royal Society Open Science and signed by Chilean researchers utilizes big data to analyze and visualize urban segregation, delivering spatial tools that allow us to develop strategies in a city of many cities. "We know there are [social] bubbles in Santiago, Chile, and that therefore, there is segregation," says Teodoro Dannemann, co-author of the research paper The time geography of segregation during working hours, in a conversation with ArchDaily. “We know that each person explores only a small fraction of the city, which is basically the home-work trajectory. This implies that we only engage with a small group of citizens," he adds.
Responding in part to recent debates on how big data will affect our built environments, Synthesis Design + Architecture have teamed up with IBM Watson Analytics to design an interior feature wall for the Watson Experience Center in San Francisco. The project, named Data Moiré after the dizzying patterns created by overlapping sets of lines, uses data from the influence of mobile phones on monthly consumer spending to create a precise screen material that defines the wall.
On Thursday, December 22nd, an email arrived in the inboxes of ArchDaily’s editors that made us sit up, shake off our holiday-induced lethargy, and take notice. MASS Design Group’s Year in Review email might initially have blended in with the many other holiday wishes and 2016 recaps we receive at that time of year—it recapped such highlights as Michael Murphy’s TED Talk in February or the launch of the first African Design Center—but it had one thing that we hadn’t seen from other firm’s years-in-review: detailed statistics about the firm’s achievements that year.
In recent decades, certain aspects of architecture have become increasingly open to scientific analysis, most notably when it comes to a building’s environmental impact. It’s no surprise, therefore, to see MASS Design Group’s claims that their work uses 74% less embodied carbon than typical building projects, or that 78% of their materials are sourced within 100 kilometers, but alongside these were some more unusual metrics: since it was founded, the firm has invested 88% of construction costs regionally, created 15,765 jobs, and in 2016 alone, their work served a total of 64,580 users. These numbers suggest a way of thinking about architecture that few have attempted before—a way that, if widely adopted, could fundamentally change the way architecture is practiced and evaluated. We spoke to MASS co-founder Alan Ricks to find out how these statistics are calculated, and what purpose they serve.
With the rise of the internet, old-fashioned brick-and-mortar stores have struggled, as online ordering services have increasingly made it unnecessary to actually go to a store. The answer for the physical stores of the future? Make spaces not for purchasing the things people need, but experiencing the things people want, as explored in this article by Matt Alderton originally published on Autodesk's Redshift publication as "How Technology and Big Data in Retail Are Shaping Store Designs of the Future." Alderton looks at how forward-looking stores are being designed to appeal to customers, finding that the same technology revolution that threatened to make stores obsolete might also play a key role in saving them, too.
Shopping used to be stimulating. Although its end was sales, its means was a mix of status and spectacle. It was social commerce in which partakers transacted not just cash, but also cachet.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the earliest department stores, whose architects designed them to be destinations. In London, for instance, Harrods boasts the motto “Omnia, Omnibus, Ubique”—Latin for “All Things for All People, Everywhere.” Established in 1849, it has seven floors, comprising more than 1 million square feet across more than 330 departments. The store installed one of the world’s first escalators in 1898, opened a world-famous food hall in 1902, and sold exotic pets such as lion cubs until the 1970s.
In recent decades, China has undergone the most dramatic urban migration in the history of the world, so you might be forgiven for thinking all that is required from urban planners is to "build it and they will come," so to speak. However, as the Western media often reports with much schadenfreude, China's unprecedented urban explosion has not come without a few missteps, and many new cities are widely claimed to be "ghost cities," empty of residents even as more gigantic apartment blocks are being built. Such stories are usually accompanied by anecdotes of empty public spaces and a rough count of the number of homes left in the dark at night, but little further empirical data. So exactly how underpopulated does a city have to be to be a "ghost city," and just how rife are such places in China?
As reported by MIT Technology Review, one Chinese web company has started looking for answers to just such questions. Baidu, effectively a Chinese version of Google, has used their "Big Data Lab" to investigate the commuting patterns of their 700 million users, establishing exactly which cities are dramatically underpopulated.
New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress has teamed up with the developers of Hudson Yards to transform the future 28-acre mixed-use neighborhood into the nations first “quantified community.” As Crain’s New York reports, the aim is to “use big data to make cities better places to live.” Information, from pedestrian traffic to energy production and resident activity levels, will be collected in order to study how cities can run efficiently and improve quality of living. You can read more on the subject, here.
The Waag Society, together with designer and software engineer Bert Spaan, have put the Netherlands back on the map - the data map. After several months of coding and design, the partnership has managed to account for all 9,866,539 buildings in the country, visualized in varying colors to identify old and new buildings. After a user clicks on a specific block, additional building and city information displays square footages, addresses, populations and programs, among other stats. Users can navigate from Amsterdam to the Hague experiencing hundreds of years of urban development along the way, from the pre-1800s to post-2005 buildings, indicated by the red to blue gradient.
.jpg?1448462729 "Owen Launch by Tacklebox Architecture. Image © Juliana Sohn for OWEN")
