Archinect - News

Sean Lally's Night White Skies podcast airs its final episode after 8 years

2024-09-12T11:02:00-04:00

After a run of over 100 episodes, the Night White Skies podcast hosted by Sean Lally is finally coming to an end.

Over eight years, the program sought to engage a diverse range of voices in the design field in order to ascertain a better picture of the scenarios currently unfolding within and surrounding architectural theory and practice.

Guests included philosophers such as Ecology Without Nature author Timothy Morton and Emanuelle Coccia. Other popular thinkers like Catherine Ingraham, Fred Scharmen, Sylvia Lavin, and Rachel Armstrong appeared alongside designers Neil Denari, Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, and MoMA curator Paola Antonelli.

In this final episode, Lally summarizes a few of the recurring topics and thoughts that have proved as salients as a means for outlining what he says is a "course forward [...] or at the very least, playing out a hunch on work still to be done."

An archive of all episodes is available at NightWhiteSkies.com for you to search now and in the futu...

AI-induced creativity and the novelty dilemma looming over architectural design

2024-08-08T12:23:00-04:00

The impact of Generative AI on human creativity is one of the most observed and debated knock-on effects of users adapting to ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other large language models (LLMs). Now, a new study has shown a "social dilemma" that occurs when creatives are given a choice between AI-assisted prompts, which resulted in better-scoring work that was nevertheless plagued by the question of novelty.

In the views of authors Anil R. Doshi and Oliver P. Hauser from the University of Exeter and University College London (UCL), this dilemma "point[s] to an increase in individual creativity at the risk of losing collective novelty."

What can be gleaned from this study in an architectural sense calls into question many of the basic precepts for augmentation, namely that it affords designers a greater range of ingenuity in terms of form, program, scale, and functional spaces without significant drawbacks. Recently there has been a shift in the zeitgeist that had previously considered the ...

Architects would do well to apply lessons from philosophy in the age of AI, says Nayef Al-Rodhan

2024-07-01T17:39:00-04:00

New AI architecture tools will, in the short term, make good design affordable and accessible. But AI will still fall short when it comes to understanding human nature as well our emotional and dignity needs. Dignity means much more than just the absence of humiliation. It also requires recognition, manifested through nine critical human needs: reason, security, human rights, accountability, transparency, justice, opportunity, innovation, and inclusiveness.

"Looking to the future, tomorrow’s architects will need to be equipped with transdisciplinary tools such as Neuro-Techno-Philosophy, a framework I have introduced to understand the AI-neuroscience-philosophy nexus underpinning our society today," Oxford University's Nayef Al-Rodhan argues in a new treatise on the uses of academic philosophy in today's AI-driven design field. "Doing so will help ensure that the buildings of the future are in tune with our neurobiological predilections, neurobehavioral needs, aspirations and values for collective peace and prosperity."

Architecture is at a critical juncture as disruptive technology is remaking the industry wholesale. A litany of issues (housing justice, etc.) worldwide nonetheless commands its attention. As Foucault famously said in the 1970s, society "must be defended."

Charles Leadbeater on the meaning of home in today's culture of rootlessness

2016-12-09T15:20:00-05:00

The tiny house is just one example of the lengths to which people will go to create a sense of home even when they lack the means for it. It’s just one symptom of a much wider and intensifying search for belonging, which makes home as important to politics as the idea of class or rights – especially now, when so many people feel displaced, both literally and figuratively, by life in innovation-driven, high-tech, networked capitalism.

How VR Reframes Big Questions in Philosophy

2016-05-24T12:09:00-04:00

Some people think VR is a second class reality. I am not sure of that

There are some convincing points here by Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers. Just imagine how the humanities future is being shaped by the fast developing technologies.

Philosopher Graham Harman to join SCI-Arc faculty

2016-02-23T19:40:00-05:00

Earlier today, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) announced that Graham Harman, Ph.D. will be joining its Liberal Arts faculty. Harman, who taught previously at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, has played a pivotal role in the development of "speculative realism" and "object-oriented ontology" (OOO), two related strands of contemporary philosophy.

Since his early exploration of the concept of "tool-being" in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Harman has laid the groundworks for a popular and influential revision of metaphysics, characterized by the rejection of anthropocentrism, which privileges the human over the nonhuman, and "correlationism", or the post-Kantian assumption that reality emerges from human thinking.

“Graham is a unique and notorious figure in philosophy and the arts. His fresh metaphysical project offers a way of understanding reality not as a product of the human mind, but rather as a cornucopia of independent and vibrant objects, la...

Master architect M.N. Ashish Ganju on working to achieve "good architecture"

2015-09-03T13:07:00-04:00

Munishwar Nath Ashish Ganju is a thought leader in Indian architectural philosophy...Based in New Delhi, Ganju cares about the fact that over a quarter of Delhi’s population lives outside the law in unauthorised colonies. He lives and works on the urban fringe, to demonstrate by example the principle of urban renewal by citizens.

In a recent Forbes interview, esteemed architect M.N. Ashish Ganju looks back on his career over the last few decades -- from the history of Indian architecture, his most notable projects, to his current efforts to instill citizen-led urban renewal in the outskirts of the country.

You can also read some of Ganju's writing here.