Illustration by Doug John Miller.

Globally, multinational tech companies are moving beyond the digital realm to enter the physical domains of where, when, and how we will produce our cities in the future. Grounded in the interdependency between us (citizens) as “users” and tech corporations as “providers,” we have no other choice than to open the doors to the core of our cities if we wish to remain “connected.” However, rather than simply accepting the imposition often dictated by tech companies and political policy-making, how can architecture’s response move beyond the current trends of uncritically adapting technology and, instead, begin to reclaim agency over architectural and urban development? What role can architects play in this seemingly-inevitable technical evolution, with their knowledge and sensitivity to the relationship between the body and space? It is undeniable that architecture will have to run much faster to catch up (with Silicon Valley) or the design of our cities will remain in the territory of digital and product design.

Automated Space

The increasing implementation of technology into daily life, dominatingly facilitated by the “The Big Five,” is introducing unprecedented abilities for corporate entities to enter both our private and public spaces, eroding perceived privacy and stability [1]. While the connected Internet of Things (IoT) is quickly transforming how we live, gadgets are now expanding beyond the scale of objects and into the scale of buildings—even cities. This shift from micro to macro scales puts into question the physical framework for our lives, towards something much less tangible, where a constant flux of real-time data adds uncountable and invisible layers to our inhabited spaces. These digital and infrastructural layers are the new brick-and-mortar for our cities, and technological implementation across scales is transforming urban space into automated and device-driven environments.

These digital and infrastructural layers are the new brick-and-mortar for our cities

Almost all the devices transforming our lives are cold and hard objects. Often camouflaged as ordinary and even cute, their underlying task is to collect our data—something not suggested in their actual design. Take the Google Home smart speaker, for instance: your own personal assistant. Although it is made from metal and plastic, it can tell you when it will rain, remind you of personal appointments, turn on your Netflix, put milk on your shopping list—to mention only a few of its many services. While your voice-controlled assistant may know more about your daily life than you do, its physical appearance is made to integrate with the rest of your interior environment. When networked and connected to third-party IoT devices within a building, the device can expand the smart home further—and even into public space.

This phenomenon can be observed recently with the planned transformation of New York City’s streets through the implementation of Google’s Sidewalk Labs and CityBridge’s collaborative LinkNY program, which is transforming 7,500 old public payphones into free high speed Wi-Fi hubs called “Links.” Although the service is free for users––a perk which feels almost “too good to be true”––the Links, in return, collect large amounts of data about the device types, identifiers, and much more, with limited transparency about the processes of how this data will then be used. At the same time, embedded into the hubs are cameras working with a dual logic. On the one hand, they directly surveil their immediate environments and store the footage on site. On the other, the cameras enable video calls for users, which are not recorded. Although described as complying with privacy terms and conditions, they nonetheless pool data without the user—or passerby—necessarily having any idea—to the advantage of the tech corporations sponsoring them. Their clandestine function is represented in their design, with the cameras barely visible beneath darkened glass.

But is it possible to build successfully with data as brick-and-mortar, removed from an architectural understanding of what makes space liveable?

Beyond the transformed streetscape, another Sidewalk Labs venture, in collaboration with Waterfront Toronto, demonstrates how tech companies are not only remodeling our homes and our streets, but soon also larger areas of our cities. Sidewalk Toronto, a project which sits on 800 acres in Quayside, a neighborhood in Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront, will be a physical translation of this pooled data from both our homes and public spaces, built “from the internet up” [2]. An almost 200-page document published by Sidewalk Toronto serves as the foundation for this new neighborhood, billed as “a new kind of mixed-use, complete community,” and unfolds in sections such as housing, mobility, and public space [3]. Packaged under the guise of economic and cultural stimuli, Sidewalk Toronto is supported by websites and promotion films. As stated by former Executive Chairman and CEO of Google Eric Schmidt in one such film, “This will be a global draw for new ideas, for economic growth and development. Our technology applied with the energy, the passion of the citizens of Toronto, will make this thing incredibly successful” [4]. But is it possible to build successfully with data as brick-and-mortar, removed from an architectural understanding of what makes space liveable? How will the pooled data from IoT objects, public, and urban space be translated into architecture? In any case, Quayside will almost certainly become a physical manifestation of the increasing hold tech corporations, such as Google, have over our built environment, and it will challenge the normative protocols of contemporary master-planning as well as the relevance of the architect in the 21st century.

The Technologist-designed City

With Google Home representing the object scale, Links the building scale, and Sidewalk Toronto the city scale, tech corporations such as Alphabet serve as a mesh overlaid on the city, weaving themselves into all pockets of our urban fabric [5]. The city is increasingly designed by technologists more than architects. A cogent example of this is the team behind Sidewalk Labs, which consists primarily of software engineers, data scientists, and fabrication designers [6]. But where are the architects? As recently noted by the Director of the Royal Institute of Dutch Architects Fred F.J. Schoorl, “This technological revolution will also influence the architecture profession. Will it eventually render the profession completely obsolete?” [7]. He continues:

New players from outside the field of design may become dominant, ultimately introducing innovations with disruptive characteristics that may have devastating effects on the self-conscious experts of spatial organization and design. If architects don’t organize themselves in multidisciplinary settings and ecosystems, and become ‘hackers’ or ‘start-ups’ themselves, they may even be drastically marginalized by business models specific to the digital age [8].

Architects are trained to care about the past, and often refer to historic value and the legacy of architecture. This stands in stark contrast to the technological logic of constantly thinking forward. Can physical space be designed with deliberate aesthetics based on the gaps between technology and the built environment? Will the architect be able to “hack” herself into the system and make the profession a key role in future design processes? Technology perpetually finds ways of legitimizing itself and it will have severe spatial consequences if architects are left out of the design processes of architecture and cities. Beside contributing with knowledge on the production of buildings, architecture as a profession has an inherited care for materials and details. Fundamental to how we experience space, these are elements often rendered out when architects are standing on the sideline.

Will the architect be able to “hack” herself into the system and make the profession a key role in future design processes? 

Reorganizing the Architectural Toolbox  

While the aesthetics of architecture have historically been, to a large extent, enabled by technology, it is clear that further bridging the two fields is necessary. As architect and educator Rem Koolhaas explored and exemplified in Fundamentals at the Venice Biennale in 2014, architecture must rethink its toolbox and begin to challenge these new architectural and technological elements. As our building material is changing, architects will have to learn how to use these less physical materials and design with them.   

Architecture and the language of architecture—platform, blueprint, structure—became almost the preferred language for indicating a lot of phenomenon that we’re facing from Silicon Valley. They took over our metaphors, and it made me think that regardless of our speed, which is too slow for Silicon Valley, we can perhaps think of the modern world maybe not always in the form of buildings but in the form of knowledge or organization and structure and society that we can offer and provide [9].

Currently architecture as a profession is largely alienated from the processes of integrating technology into the design of spaces and buildings

As alluded by Koolhaas, architects have to reinstate their relevance and challenge how to organize themselves, as well as build an understanding of how to feed into this evolution and suggest values beyond those established by the technological logic proposed by the “Big Five.” Currently architecture as a profession is largely alienated from the processes of integrating technology into the design of spaces and buildings—a convention which needs to shift or the architect’s knowledge will otherwise become an outdated expertise. This applies mainly to how architects could challenge more the current conventions of merging ideas of spatial experiences with tech. Head-to-head discussions, such as those between the CEO of home heating start-up Nest Tony Fadell, and Koolhaas are encouraging direct connections between the two disciplines, but how can this type of agonism become normalized to the extent where it will begin to influence our physical spaces? [10]      

Technology is learning and constantly optimizing its processes from data. Architecture must do the same. If our built spaces can be designed with an awareness of how to design with technological elements, the relevance of architecture will begin to shift. It will require a fundamental reorganization of the architectural toolbox and an understanding from architects of how autonomous, accidental, and intertwined layers of our cities are affecting each other. While this reorganization is taking place, architects must insist on the values of materiality and detailing of future buildings. This is inevitable in the process of sustaining architecture’s agency––where data as the new brick-and-mortar goes beyond a technological logic and begins to suggest desires of aesthetics and values as fundamental to how our physical spaces will be designed in the future.  

Architects have, historically, been both champions of public space and complicit in its erasure

But while the participation of architects within the technological transformation of our cities could go a long way towards improving the spatial experience of these environments, it leaves unresolved the issue of how to mitigate the corporate seizure of our cities. That is, architects have, historically, been both champions of public space and complicit in its erasure. To regain relevance, they must not only assert their expertise in design, but also an ethical stance against surveillance and privatization. “Connected” does not have to mean surveilled. “Smart” does not have to equal private. It is through proposing the possibility of a different type of technological city that the architect can assert their importance. We have the capacity to invent new worlds—now we must use it.

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[1] The term ‘Big Five’ is often used to categorize the world’s largest and most powerful tech companies: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Alphabet (Google).
[2] Emily Badger, “Google’s Founders Wanted to Shape a City. Toronto Is Their Chance,” The New York Times, October 18, 2017, accessed January 6, 2018.
[3] Sidewalk Toronto, accessed February 12, 2018, https://sidewalktoronto.ca/.
[4] Sidewalk Toronto (video), accessed January 16
[5] Alphabet is the parent company of Google and several of its subsidiaries. These include Google Ventures, Google Capital, Google X, and others.
[6] Sidewalk Labs, accessed January 10.
[7] Fred F.J. Schoorl, “The Architect at Risk,” Volume 51 (2017).
[8] Ibid.
[9] Diana Budds, “Rem Koolhaas: Architecture Has A Serious Problem Today,” co.design, May 21, 2016, accessed January 6, 2018.
[10] “Tony Fadell and Rem Koolhaas on Design in the Digital Age,” (video), accessed January 19.