Rem Koolhaas on the Smart Landscape and Intelligent Architecture

2015-04-01T13:25:00-04:00

Architecture has entered into a new engagement with digital culture and capital—which amounts to the most radical change within the discipline since the confluence of modernism and industrial production in the early twentieth century. Yet this shift has gone largely unnoticed, because it has not taken the form of a visible upheaval or wholesale transformation. To the contrary: It is a stealthy infiltration of architecture via its constituent elements.

In this brief but sweeping consideration of the place of architecture under today's "digital regime," Koolhaas displays (again) his unique insightfulness.

Here are some highlights:

"For thousands of years, the elements of architecture were deaf and mute—they could be trusted. Now, many of them are listening, thinking, and talking back, collecting information and performing accordingly."
"The tech world’s gradual colonization of architecture is taking place without the collaboration of its host. As technology triumphs, architecture is simply left behind."
"With safety and security as selling points, the city is becoming vastly less adventurous and more predictable. To save the city, it may have to be destroyed. . . ."
"In the service of the ubiquitous digital regime, a hyper-Cartesian order is being imposed on the countryside, paradoxically leaving the city to take on the poetic and arbitrary appearance once reserved for the pastoral."
"If the digital is about to deliver us to a sensor cul...

Building a better big box

2013-04-03T16:41:00-04:00

D’Hooghe, a Belgian-born architect and director of the Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT, cares deeply about urban form and the large-scale issues cities face in achieving more efficient energy use, better transportation and less congestion. One of his main concerns is better integrating suburbs with the larger metropolitan areas in which they exist.

Archinect - News

Rem Koolhaas on the Smart Landscape and Intelligent Architecture

Building a better big box