hours of human recognition. This kind
of intellectual labour is only needed once to
forever inform COCO-connected computers.
Powerful image-capture and data analysis
techniques are becoming routine for managing
major buildings and public places. As well as
identifying people in crowds, security cameras
and software can individually track clusters
of moving vehicles, even at night. All of these
observation systems are being integrated with
traffic lights, smartpoles and building HVAC
(heating, ventilation and cooling) systems.
These are just some on-the-ground examples
of this century’s most ambitious computer science
paradigm – to use satellite-enabled telemetry
systems to deliver a massive ambition that is
officially named the Global Earth Observation
System of Systems’ (GEOSS). This United
Nations-supported project is today’s update of
Richard Buckminster Fuller’s 1928 (pre-electronic
computing) vision of a ‘4D Air-Ocean World
Town Plan’, which Al Gore updated with his
1992 prediction of a ‘Digital Earth’. The passion
being pursued by today’s scientists is to massively
extend familiar satellite weather mapping and
radar monitoring to create a dynamic, ‘atlas’ of
all of the Earth’s complex environmental systems.
Imagine BIM for our whole planet – it’s
enough to blow the brain of any mere mortal.
Will designers of future urban projects be
able to exploit the holy grail of quantumcomputing to crunch challenging environmental
simulations? Editors at MIT Technology
Review suggest that ‘practical’ quantum
computers are imminent. To be useful, these
must provide ‘quantum supremacy’ – much
higher capacities than existing supercomputers.
The first serious q-machines will come from one
or more of the main current research sponsors:
Google, Microsoft, Intel, IBM and QuTech.
Google has been testing a 49-qubit system that
is intended to more than double the calculation
powers of the fastest existing supercomputers- and experts predict machines with more than
a million qubits by 2030. Qubits are the basic
information units of quantum computing, and
they offer massive parallel processing potentials
compared with today’s binary processing of
bits and bytes. Qubits can use both 0 and 1 to
carry much more data in binary code than with
electronic bits switching between 0 or 1.
How might designers exploit quantum
computing? Simulations of complex systems
evidently will become vastly more sophisticated
and realistic, and automated flows of sensor
data and machine learning will be massively
accelerated. These potentials seem to challenge,
at least partially, Patrik Schumacher’s ‘long wave
of parametricism’ – where designs are generated
within rules pre-coded by human programmers.
A more outré ambition, for ‘living
architecture’ (LIAR), was proposed by Rachel
Armstrong in her Bartlett College doctoral
thesis-book, Vibrant Architecture: Matter as a
Co-Designer of Living Structures. After a series
of international experiments, including ways to
calcify Venice’s substructure of timber pylons,
she advanced the morphogenesis theories
of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and Alan
Turing by integrating chemical and biological
cellular generative processes with architectural
structures and challenges.
Armstrong and a trans-Europe research group
of ‘space architects’ have been funded to clarify
how LIAR concepts could be applied to earthly
or extra-terrestrial habitats. One of her Newcastle
University students, Simone Ferracina, tested
three types of curvy building blocks that could
act also as programmable, hybrid, bioreactor
units. As well as being stable units of a structure,
they could activate life-enhancing processes: to
extract nutrients and pollution from sunlight,
wastewater and air, or generate enough oxygen,
proteins and biomass (fertiliser) to sustain a
healthy, closed-loop environment for occupants
of a future ‘worldship’.
Armstrong’s ‘black-sky thinking’ – anticipating
human living at least 80 years beyond the usual
20–30-year timeframe of blue-sky thinking- also has been informed by Christopher
Alexander’s pattern language principles and
his more recent concept of ‘living structures’.
In a four-volume treatise, The Nature of Order,
All intelligence,
artificial or
natural, flows
from competent
processing of
information.
Architecture & design /PeoPle/ jul-sep 201920ADQ3_018_021_AI Architecture_V1.indd 20 26/7/19 4:49 pm