Any architectural protocol in the future shall seek to enable extended participation, and as a consequence it must be able to grow in complexity in time and itself embody a form of artificial intelligence.
by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto
published in The Routledge Companion to Paradigms of Performativity in Design and Architecture - Using Time to Craft an Enduring, Resilient and Relevant Architecture, edited by Mitra Kanaani, p. 174-188
In the Anthropocene, an epoch when our civilization has impacted on metabolic processes at a planetary scale, we are depending, perhaps paradoxically, upon non-anthropocentric forms of intelligence. Without us noticing today we inhabit the Urbansphere, the global apparatus of contemporary urbanity, a dense network of informational, material and energetic infrastructures that sustain our increasingly demanding metabolism. In order to provide the required levels of resources in the right place at the right time the Urbansphere interrupts the fluctuating metabolisms of the other spheres of life on Earth.
The miniaturisation, distribution and intelligence of the networks of the Urbansphere and of its nodes have reached inhuman complexity, engendering evolving processes of synthetic life within itself Endo-symbiotic relationships unexpectedly emerge among its heterogeneous components, especially when biologic evolution negotiates contaminated habitats and ubiquitous forms of artificial intelligence. Therefore, in the Anthropocene we need more than ever strategies to deal with such complexity and with the inhuman logics underpinning it.