Archinect - News

Is data the key to AI shining in architecture, or will it eventually replace us?

2018-12-28T16:55:00-05:00

The core issue centers around the idea that creatives will be replaced by super-intelligent robots to design buildings, create art, or design vehicles. Yet even as AI evolves across other design-related industries, AI could prove to do more good than bad, tackling the mundane so that you can augment your creative process.

Artificial Intelligence has already changed the nature of industries like manufacturing and cybersecurity. However, where does architecture fit into this mix? A harrowing concern is super intelligent robots may replace the creative practice and take over the design process that architects and designers spend years studying. However, with this new found accessibility in automation and AI, perhaps there is way for architects to view more pros than cons.

MX3D Bridge Image © MX3D

At the heart of AI is an understanding, processing, and translation of data. By processing massive amounts of data at a rapid rate, AI allows for fabrication and prototyping to happen in an instant. For an architect, the quick processing of data allows for more room to reinvest time in design. Countless hours of research goes into starting any new project and with the help of data, architects can acquire building codes and zoning data at the touch of a button.

As one of the largest byproducts of the 21st centur...

Google's Environmental Insights Explorer tracks carbon pollution on a local level

2018-10-05T18:35:00-04:00

Google has started estimating greenhouse-gas emissions for individual cities, part of what it recently described as an ambitious new plan to deploy its hoard of geographic information on the side of climate-concerned local leaders.

Google has launched a new online tool, the Environmental Insights Explorer, which tracks emissions inventory on a city scale. The program is still in beta mode and currently only provides data for five cities (Pittsburgh, PA; Mountain View, CA; Victoria, BC; Melbourne, AU; Buenos Aires, AR) but could eventually turn into an enormously helpful planning tool for municipalities—especially while the consensus on man-made global warming can be frustratingly murky on the state and federal level.

Google Maps is integrating buildings and architectural details, far surpassing other map makers such as Apple & Bing

2017-12-21T16:51:00-05:00

Justin O'Beirne lays out years worth of research on mapping technologies in his essay Google Map's Moat. O'Beirne reveals,"Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps [...] The biggest difference is the building footprints: Google seems to have them all, while Apple doesn’t have any. [...] The buildings are a new thing, and I’ve been watching Google gradually add them over the past year."

With plenty of map screenshot GIFs, O'Beirne illustrates how Google has integrated architecture (including sheds, trailers, garages, etc.) with fairly accurate architectural detail just in the past year. Compared alongside Apple and other mapping technologies, Google is far ahead of the game.

Architectural detail on churches from Google maps, even the front steps are included. Photo: Justin O'Beirne.

Google is also using this data to create AOI's, Areas of Interest, on it's mapping service. Using it's building footprint data collected from satellites and the function of tho...

Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens

2017-10-27T11:24:00-04:00

allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step

"For instance, people with low ratings will have slower internet speeds; restricted access to restaurants, nightclubs or golf courses; and the removal of the right to travel freely abroad with, I quote, "restrictive control on consumption within holiday areas or travel businesses". Scores will influence a person's rental applications, their ability to get insurance or a loan and even social-security benefits. Citizens with low scores will not be hired by certain employers and will be forbidden from obtaining some jobs, including in the civil service, journalism and legal fields, where of course you must be deemed trustworthy. Low-rating citizens will also be restricted when it comes to enrolling themselves or their children in high-paying private schools. I am not fabricating this list of punishments. It's the reality Chinese citizens will face. As the government document states, the social credit system will "allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it har...

Building a gentrification early warning system with big data

2017-08-30T19:05:00-04:00

But what if there were a way to see gentrification long before the coffee shops, condos and Whole Foods appear? What if city planners and neighborhoods had an early warning system that could sniff out the changes just as they begin? [...] neighborhood advocates would have the opportunity to implement policies ranging from reserving affordable housing units to educating residents of their renting rights to helping small businesses negotiate long-term lease extensions.

In his NPR piece, astrophysics professor Adam Frank explains how various big data sets, like housing prices, eviction records, census data, or social media usage, can be utilized for "predictive analytics" to detect early onsets of gentrification for specific neighborhoods at an increasingly high resolution — and what significant perils come with it.

All that data Uber has been collecting might just come in handy

2017-01-12T12:27:00-05:00

Uber has A rocky history with city governments—to put it mildly... Now, Uber is making something of a peace offering. The company is launching a new service that could help cities master their traffic. It’s called Uber Movement, and it uses information on the billions of rides Uber has completed.

Uber Movement is free for the select planning agencies and researchers granted access to it. With it, you can gauge travel times between any two locations. Since, as Uber's chief of transportation policy notes, Uber doesn't actually do any urban planning, they figure they might as well give all this information to the people who do. And, hey, maybe it'll help the ride-sharing company cozy up to previously hostile city governments.

Copenhagen is the first city to try to monetize its data

2016-06-09T13:29:00-04:00

Copenhagen has become the first city in the world to attempt to monetize its, and others’, data through a city data market. Traffic snarl-ups, home break-ins, whether it rained or snowed, and how much electricity the city dwellers use each day is among the data to be traded for cash, city officials announced. Interestingly, the city, which is partnering with Hitachi on the project, also wants to incorporate others’ data.

"Not all data will have a price tag—some of it will be free, but it will be anonymized anyway."

Relatedly, in a recent conversation with Joseph Grima, co-founder of Space Caviar, the architect suggested, "...the home is becoming a factory of data to the point that one could pay one's rent through the process of producing data simply through a set of domestic activities."

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This month, Archinect's coverage includes a special thematic focus, Privacy. Have projects that grapple with how city data and other new modes of urbanism have changed our notion of privacy? Submit to our open call by Sunday, June 19.

Losing yourself in the smart city

2015-12-03T18:35:00-05:00

Thanks to Big Data, it is now next to impossible to reside anonymously in a modern city. Why? Because data anonymization itself is almost impossible without using advanced cryptography. Our every transaction leaves a digital marker that can be mined by anyone with the right tools or enough determination.

‘In the end, they will destroy democracy' – The Guardian on smart cities

2014-12-29T13:05:00-05:00

The smart city is, to many urban thinkers, just a buzzphrase that has outlived its usefulness: ‘the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people’. So why did that happen – and what’s coming in its place?

Creating a universal language for city data

2014-06-05T15:28:00-04:00

City policymakers will have objective standards to compare their services and performance with other cities around the world. And just as significant, the people of cities — civic, business organizations, ordinary citizens — will be able to access the same new global standards.

This is a big, global deal. The International Organization for Standardization, based in Geneva, has issued a list of standards dictating the precise kind of data cities should be collecting, to gauge performance and character. Previously, comparisons between supposedly identical data points in different cities was not guaranteed to be "apples to apples". For example, one city's definition of "unemployment" being more restrictive than another's, making rankings faulty and discrediting performance grades.

View the 46 indicators for cities to report on, that will place them in line with the new ISO standards.

Regarding comparisons between cities, rigorously investigating the exact definition of any data sounds like an obvious consideration, but with the earnest and speedy surge in city's data collection, "more" seems to have been the optimal word, and not "stricter". In 2008, when the Global Cities Indicators Facility at the University of Toronto compared ranking metrics for seven world...

Methodolatry and the Art of Measure

2013-11-06T17:41:00-05:00

The default recourse to data-fication, the presumption that all meaningful flows and activity can be sensed and measured, is taking us toward a future in which the people shaping our cities and their policies rarely have the opportunity to consider the nature of our stickiest urban problems and the kind of questions they raise.

What do corporate smart-city programs have in common with D.I.Y. science projects and civic hackathons? “Theirs is a city with an underlying logic,” writes Shannon Mattern, “made more efficient — or just, or sustainable, or livable — with a tweak to its algorithms or an expansion of its dataset.”

On Places, Mattern argues that the new wave of urban data science (and solutionism) is trending toward an obsession with data-for-data’s-sake and an idolization of landscape research methods.