While expectations are high, the reality will certainly be more measured. Peter Scully, Technical Director of B-made (Bartlett Manufacturing and Design Exchange) at The Bartlett School of Architecture, agrees: "It's important to understand these emergent technologies as products of all that has gone before them. Secondly, these technologies will be mostly complementing established production rather than replacing it. The combination of established and emerging technologies will draw our focus towards the linkages between processes – understand these and you are in a very creatively powerful position."

Scully's colleague, Dr. Sean Hanna, Reader in Space and Adaptive Architectures at The Bartlett, offers this: "We build today at a scale and pace that is unprecedented. We need buildings to satisfy requirements than have never existed before, so to this extent we can't simply replicate past models. But this shouldn't be taken to justify unfettered innovation for it's own sake. Our challenge has always been to reinterpret, or recode to a the new situation."

In the paraphrasing of Theodore Spyropoulos, Director of the Architectural Association's Design Research Lab (AADRL) in London: “Cedric Price famously said 'Technology is the answer,’ he followed this statement with 'What was the question?' For us, it is important to see beyond the fixed and finite and move towards models that are adaptive and evolving. Technology is a very human pursuit and we believe that it can be an active agent in It's important to note that this technology is being used as a tool, it's not like we should depend on it 100%participating in our society."

But for students at the coalface of emerging technology, things are slightly more routine. Chaitanya Chavan and Sulaiman Alothman, Masters students on the EmTech course at the AA, are part of the next-generation feeling their way along the unfolding technological landscape. I spoke with them about how education is adapting to these exciting new technological possibilities.

Mindful students at the front line of emerging technology

Chavan and Alothman are developing a seismic resistant construction system, that allows for evacuation to a safety zone in the event of an earthquake. The system involves topologically interlocking mortar-less bricks, designed to be implemented in the city of Istanbul, which is expecting to be hit by a 7.2 magnitude earthquake sometime in the near future.

"We are trying to fabricate the material system at the moment," explains Alothman, "We are prototyping in the lab on an Ultimator tabletop printer. We are using just the VLA [variable line array] as the material, which is limiting in the sense that it doesn't behave as it would in real life. But this process is more to do with geometrical experiments using the printer."

“I think 3D print technology is important for us," explains Chavan. "It's easy to experiment with, it's fast, we can make a lot of prototypes in a matter of hours, it adds value to the design regarding analysis with actual material behaviour. I think it's necessary for students in the field to get in touch with this technology. It's important to note that this technology is being used as a tool, it's not like we should depend on it 100% to produce fancy models or cool designs, it's more on the experimental side for building or designing prototypes.”

Be mindful in your experimentation

There should always be a balance between what you get from quick experiments and what you have from your research."Sometimes it does happen that you get carried away by the quick results by having it as a tool at your disposal," explains Chavan. "Our work requires a lot of research and theoretical know-how that should lead to these outputs rather than just taking the answer because it came out of a piece of software. There should always be a balance between what you get from quick experiments and what you have from your research."

What constructive criticism has the duo received on their process? Alothman mentions "One factor is the scalability issue; we are producing these prototypes in a very small scale because of the limitation we have now." Chavan agrees. "What you build in a lab cannot really be built in a real world scenario; it has to be really tested. We are evaluating the performance of the material being in a real scenario using digital analysis software. However we cannot depend totally on the digital analysis software, it could behave completely different in real life." 

How would their process be different in an analogue environment? Both Chevan and Alothman laugh at the very idea before Chevan responds "A lot! It's quite difficult to imagine working without what we have at the moment – the technology at our disposal, we take for granted." Alothman simply states, "I couldn't imagine myself carving a block of concrete to get my form."

When I mention this to Weinstock, he smiles as he states, "Coders and hackers are heroes for a new generation; it's the generational change, a lot of people in educational institutions are maybe a little slow to realise that".

Where current architectural education is going right (and wrong) in teaching emergent technologies

"There has been a huge increase in the number of students learning e.g. scripting and coding as part of their education. The ubiquity of tools, like Grasshopper, makes some computation easy even for those who haven't," explains Dr. Hanna. "I believe this is excellent in that it provides a set of skills that, like drawing, are becoming more and more useful in the production of architecture."

The breakthroughs here will be in the education of how we can exploit the new tech in addition to our current tool kit."These are additional tools to our current capability," agrees Scully. "If anything is going wrong in architectural education surrounding emerging technologies, it is the mis-perception that they will replace. This is mostly due to euphoria surrounding 3D printing. This process that creates components on the blank canvas for me acts as a metaphor for current hopes and aspirations for the new technologies and underlines the problems with it. The 3D print is about total control of the production environment and material down to the 100micron (and below on some technologies). We don't have this control in our live-production environments. The breakthroughs here will be in the education of how we can exploit the new tech in addition to our current tool kit."

Towards New Production Management

How architecture and construction industries are adapting and accommodating to emerging technologies

"Designers are now able to control the methods that will manufacture their design," explains Scully. "The use of digital design and production technologies, isn't so much negating skill, more the migration of it up the production pathway. The skill now sits with the craft of producing production information, whether that be the M+E layout relying on a 3D scan, or a CNC tool path that not only wants to remove material to create the part, but wants to show the tool path that made it."

On a production management level, Scully points towards communication, as he states: "If contracts and procurement can allow the flow of information and knowledge between the architectural and construction industries, a much more exacting and efficient use of resources will give us a built environment that serves our purpose with fewer overheads. The first move will be designing the contract framework that will support this."

New Strategies Needed for Data Sharing

Data becomes more useful when it becomes more accessible. This often raises issues of legality or competition, for which new strategies should be found.Dr. Hanna continues the theme of data communication, saying, "A big change is that we're becoming more adept at handling data, and we have access to much more of it. This can be wide, such as Twitter usage or post-occupancy building performance across a sector or geographical area, or intense and local, like fine, online measurement of local deflection of a material during fabrication.”

As a pragmatic move, Dr Hanna. notes, "Industries should consider how better to share data. Data becomes more useful when it becomes more accessible. This often raises issues of legality or competition, for which new strategies should be found."

Challenging Convention

Research from the AADRL Spyropoulos Design Lab explores, amongst other things, an architecture that is self-aware, self-structured and self-assembles. "The research explores high population of mobility agents that evolve an architecture that moves beyond the fixed and finite towards a behavioural model of interactive human and machine ecologies," states Spyropoulos. "We attempt to push the limits of things. We explore matter, forms of production, machine learning, robotics, material life cycles, systems and scales. It is a symbiotic and engaged human-machine ecology."

Models of the past cannot operate as blueprints for our future.According to Spyropoulos, “Models of the past cannot operate as blueprints for our future.” What new blueprints do we then have in emergent technologies that others can learn from? "We do not believe in master plans or blueprints. Rather, we look to develop adaptive systems that embrace latency and uncertainty and explore time and duration as a medium for exploration," explains Spyropoulos. "Architecture makes demands and for us (though we do not foreground technologies in our work), they play an instrumental role on how we evolve our practice."

From the Cocoon, Technology Emerges

Weinstock, having just returned from a forum in Innsbruck, reflected on the directions of exploration: "We've been looking at very small, very cheap collaborative robots, robots in construction, rather than the big monster ones that are already going pretty well. So, new smaller robots are very exciting. A lot of people are exploring drones, flying material to put them in place on sites. Climbing robots that can pass threads from one another, weaving nets in 3D in space. The mathematics for me is super interesting because social insects in collaboration can do amazing things."Taking a non-position or defaulting to models of the past is not progress and does not propose an alternative to the challenges of today.

Handling Uncertainty

"Science fiction has become fact," explains Spyropoulos. "Architects must participate and use at their disposal whatever tools can assist them in the ever-complex world we live in. Taking a non-position or defaulting to models of the past is not progress and does not propose an alternative to the challenges of today. Mies van der Rohe reminds us of this: ‘It is not possible to go forward while looking back.’"

This may be inspiring, but to many the type of investigations underway do still seem like science fiction. Dr. Hanna presents a project that the Bartlett is currently working on that matches A.I. with pragmatic engineering solutions. "We have a new project just starting called Innochain," Dr. Hanna explains, "And one of the areas I expect to grow is in the use of computation to handle uncertainty in construction, whether it's material, structural or due to human interaction. While much of this appears directed at engineering, much of it is founded in a more fundamental interest in artificial intelligence and explaining creative thought." That spectrum from fiction to fact will still be based in human creativity.