One Architecture operates on a variety of scales, places and design fields. While working in these different realities and contexts, ONE recognizes the growing importance of digital technology and Smart Cities for today’s design questions. Often working as an integrator between different disciplines and agenda’s, One Architecture is more and more often using technology and technological tools. In the years ONE started to make technology and Smart City thinking part of both traditional projects and some special (research) projects. These projects evolve around four themes, each addressed with different, context-related, partners:

Smart Governance with The Mobile City. The rise of ‘big’ and ‘open’ data allows for new actors and new ways to get insight into urban infrastructures, salient urban issues as well as in opportunities for urban development. Next to that the rise of (social) media platforms provide citizens and institutions with new tools to organize publics around collective issues, mobilize people, and manage social infrastructural resources in collaborative ways. One Architecture works more and more as ‘arrangeur’ in citymaking processes.

Smart Fabrication with Waag Society and Filson and Rorhbacher. New relationships between designers and fabrication are made possible through digital fabrication. Digital technology and Building Information Modeling have changed the way our teams work and how our architecture is simulated. Using ‘direct prototyping’ and computer-aided manufacturing (CNC or robotics), One Architecture, with its partners, is constructing a number of projects.

In the Netherlands, ONE co-curates the Buiksloterham Living Lab, a 600 acre brownfield redevelopment in Amsterdam-Noord based on the principles of the circular economy — therein also acting as investors for a small housing area.ONE initiated both the research and the housing project and is a core member of the circular Buiksloterham team.

Currently, ONE’s New York office is expanding on its expertise by working on “Smart City” digital infrastructures and data-analysis