For many, it is a leap of the imagination to think that a microprocessor the size of your fingertip, or the mobile phone in your pocket, can meaningfully affect the shape of the room you’re sitting in, let alone a city’s skyline. At a moment when new digital technologies seem to be dematerializing more and more of the world around us (think books, CDs, photographs), what impact can they possibly have on the insistent materiality of buildings and cities?

According to Nicholas Carr, author and the former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, the advent of the electrical grid in the nineteenth century may offer parallels for understanding the possible implications of the technological revolution we are currently experiencing. In The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google, Carr argues that while the nation’s grid was initially developed primarily as a means to provide safe and accessible power to industry, it set off a chain reaction of unintended consequences that ultimately transformed American society. “The rise of the middle class, the expansion of public education, the flowering of mass culture, the movement of the population to the suburbs, the shift from an industrial to a service economy,” Carr argues, “None of these would have happened without the cheap current generated by utilities.” And all of these were reflected in equally radical transformations in the built environment.

We are now on the cusp of a similarly fundamental reconfiguration of physical space, one in which a vast and mostly invisible layer of technology is being embedded into the world around us. Using a wide range of complex technologies and devices — from microprocessors and electronic identification tags to sensors and networked information systems — buildings and cities are being transformed, imbued with the capacity to sense, record, process, transmit, and respond to information and activity taking place within and around them. Of course, predictions for a future “smart” city have been floating around for decades, and we are all familiar with the false starts and wrong turns. What makes this moment unlike any before, however, is that for the first time the decreasing cost of the hardware and the increasing computational power of the software have converged so that it is now feasible to embed enormously powerful digital intelligence and processing capability into any object or space of our choosing. If experience has taught us anything, it is that new technologies get integrated into the existing built fabric in complex and unexpected ways, and that the forms they take have an enormous effect on daily life and social relations. A “sentient” city will be a future reality. The questions now are: what will it look like, how will it work, and who will benefit from it?

Toward the Sentient City, curated by Mark Shepard and organized by the Architectural League, is intended to serve as both demonstration and provocation for thinking about alternative ways to answer these and other questions. It is also intended to bring architects and urban designers into a conversation that until now has been dominated by technologists. That these technologies will continue to permeate our lives is inevitable. The possibilities for integrating the disparate parts of our lives into a networked whole, for increasing safety and security, for off-setting environmental degradation, are too great to forego — and the potential for economic gain will be too seductive to resist. We should not let the technology (or the terminology) mislead us into thinking that these are issues relevant, and accessible, only to the technorati. What we are talking about is nothing short of a complete reorientation of our relationship to the built environment. Architects and urban designers must insert themselves now into the discussion of how these technologies are conceptualized and deployed, or risk being sidelined as our future environment takes shape.

Acknowledgments

The League is also extremely grateful to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for its support in helping to make this exhibition possible and to the Department of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning and the Department of Media Study, College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Buffalo for their generous support. And finally, the League expresses its gratitude to all of the individuals who participated in creating the commissioned projects that are the heart of this exhibition. Their work and ideas, talent and enthusiasm, have been inspiring.

Gregory Wessner, Exhibitions Director,
The Architectural League of New York

One could argue that this provocation by Peter Cook, published in 1963 in the catalogue for the Living City exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London ^[1], remains remarkably relevant for anyone interested in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. In place of natural weather systems, however, today we find the dataclouds of 21st century urban space increasingly shaping our experience of this city and the choices we make there. To what degree are these informatic weather systems becoming as important, if not more so, than the formal organization of space and material?

Since the late 1980s, computer scientists and engineers have been researching ways of embedding computational ‘intelligence’ into the built environment. Looking beyond the paradigm of personal computing, which placed the computer in the foreground of our attention, research in ubiquitous computing projected a world where computers would disappear into the background, displaced to the periphery of our awareness. Enabled by tiny, inexpensive microprocessors and low-power wireless sensor networks, information processing was to become ambient. No longer solely “virtual,” human interaction with and through computers in this near-future world would be more socially integrated and spatially contingent as everyday objects and spaces became linked through networked computing.

Today, as computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, we increasingly find information processing capacity embedded within and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space. Artifacts and systems we interact with daily collect, store and process information about us, or are activated by our movements and transactions. Ubiquitous computing evangelists herald a coming age of urban infrastructure capable of sensing and responding to the events and activities transpiring around them. Imbued with the capacity to remember, correlate and anticipate, this near-future “sentient” ^[2] city is envisioned as being capable of reflexively monitoring its environment and our behavior within it, becoming an active agent in the organization of everyday life in urban public space.

Few may quibble about “smart” traffic light control systems that more efficiently manage the ebbs and flows of cars, trucks, and busses on our city streets. But some may be irritated when discount coupons for their favorite espresso drink are beamed to their mobile phone as they pass by Starbucks. And many are likely to protest when they are denied passage through a subway turnstile because it “senses” that their purchasing history, mobility patterns and current galvanic skin response (GSR) reading happen to match the profile of a terrorist.

Despite the obvious implications for the built environment, architects have been largely absent from this discussion. Forty years ago Reyner Banham illustrated an architecture of the ‘well-tempered environment’ ^[3] , where the conditioning of space and its attendant technologies were literally drawn out of the woodwork. Yet while advances in the design of building management systems (BMS) since then have enabled greater environmental responsiveness at the scale of a building, relatively little attention has been paid to the space between and beyond buildings – the sidewalks, streets, infrastructures and urban public spaces that give form to urban life. If one accepts that the various ways we interact with (and through) these embedded, mobile and pervasive technologies can shape our experience of the city and the choices we make there, then the role of architects in shaping these technologies becomes apparent. Architects are trained to shape our constructed environment, and are skilled in orchestrating complex relationships between space, material, technologies, and various modes of habitation and use.

To the extent that business interests and government agencies drive these technological developments, we can expect to see new forms of consumption, surveillance and control emerge. Within architecture, the recent fascination with building envelopes wrapped with large-scale programmable “urban screens” or corporate lobbies outfitted with so-called “interactive architecture” highlights the dilemma. In an age of urban computing and ambient informatics, what opportunities for the design of urban artifacts and spaces lie beyond the architectural surface as confectionary spectacle or the interior vestibule as glorified automatic door opener?

The projects in Toward the Sentient City explore alternate trajectories for the design and inhabitation of this near-future urban environment. Building on a discourse initiated by the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium in the fall of 2006 that I organized together with Omar Khan and Trebor Scholz, and extended through the Situated Technologies Pamphlets Series that we continue to edit, this exhibition attempts to manifest some of the more abstract concepts that have evolved out of a series of conversations between researchers, writers and other practitioners of architecture, art, philosophy of technology, comparative media study, performance studies, and engineering. Aiming to broaden the purview of architecture and urban design, the projects presented here pose new sites of practice and working methods for an expanded field.

Too Smart City, by David Jimison and Joo Yoon Paek, posits a set of “intelligent” street furniture that behaves in unexpected ways, each embedded with computing and robotic systems to augment their respective roles in public space. We generally assume our machines will treat us benignly, or at least with calculated indifference. Jimison and Paek give voice and character to these common urban objects and ask us to consider what design criteria we need for our future interactions with smart artifacts deployed by municipal agencies.

Submerging the Sentient City under water, David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang in collaboration with Natalie Jeremijenko present Amphibious Architecture, a public interface to water quality and aquatic life of urban rivers, and our interest therein. Two networks of floating interactive tubes, installed at sites in the East River and the Bronx River, house a range of sensors below water and an array of lights above water. What new interaction partners for environmental governance might ubiquitous computing enable? The project encourages us to expand our view of what constitutes the city and its citizens, aiming to spark public interest in and discussion about shared urban ecologies.

Natural Fuse, by Haque Design+Research, is a city-wide network of electronically-assisted plants that act both as energy providers and as a shared ‘carbon sink’ resource. The project encourages collective cooperation in regulating energy consumption through a network of natural ‘circuit breakers’ distributed throughout the city. If people cooperate on energy use, the plants thrive (and everyone may use more energy); but if they don’t, the network starts to kill plants, thus diminishing the network’s electricity capacity. At a time when the enclosure of public amenities by private interests has become commonplace, Haque deploys a more horizontally distributed notion of ‘the commons’ prompting us to rethink our relationship to shared resources.

Projecting a future scenario where ubiquitous technologies help make 100% recycling a reality, Trash Track, by the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, deploys a set of smart tags on different types of trash and follows these through the city’s waste management system to reveal the end-of-life journey of our everyday objects. The project examines what kind of agency objects might gain once given the ability to self-report their end of life-cycle conditions. Asking what happens when our waste is no longer “out of sight, out of mind,” the project makes visible the invisible infrastructures of trash removal, promoting a bottom-up approach to managing resources and promoting behavioral change.

Breakout!, by Anthony Townsend and the Breakout! team, is a festival of work in the city that explores the dynamic possibilities of a single question: what if the entire city was your office? Breakout! provides alternative venues for collaborative work outside of traditional office buildings by injecting lightweight versions of essential office infrastructure into urban public space and coordinating impromptu meetups through social networking software. Countering the idea that mobile and networked technologies contribute to the social atomization of public space, Breakout! works toward enabling specific socio-spatial practices as a means to reinvigorate public space and stimulate collaborative work interactions.

Focused more on raising questions than posing answers, Toward the Sentient City is less concerned with projecting near-future urban conditions than providing concrete examples in the present around which to organize a public discussion about just what kind of future we might want. At a time where environmental concerns are paramount in the minds of many, what new interaction partners for environmental governance might we identify? What different approaches might we take toward working with (and within) urban ecosystems assembled by both human and non-human actors? If our infrastructure is to become capable of not just sensing the conditions within which it is operating but also perceiving something about those conditions, how do we make sure it cares about the way it responds? When urban artifacts, such as articles of trash, are imbued with the capacity to self-report their current location, condition and status, how will we view their new-found authority? How will we reconcile the inevitable conflicts in reporting between these artifacts and, say, those of a municipal agency? Finally, if the meaning of urban public spaces is as much a product of their spatial and material arrangement as it is of the conditions of their use, what new types of activity can be enabled in these spaces, and toward what ends?

Ultimately, Toward the Sentient City argues against a techno-determinism that cedes overwhelming agency to new technologies and either champions or laments their projected impact on urban life. Rather, the exhibition examines the relationship between ubiquitous computing, architecture and the city in terms of the active role its citizens might play – or neglect to play – as both designers and inhabitants, in the unfolding techno-social situations of near-future urban environments.

Mark Shepard, Curator
Assistant Professor of Architecture and Media Study, University at Buffalo

[1] Cook, Peter. “Living City”, Living Arts Magazine, no. 2, London: Institute for Contemporary Art, 1963.

[2] Here it is important to distinguish between “sentience” (from latin root sentire: to feel) and “sapience” (from sapere: to know). Sentience refers to the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, and does not necessarily include the faculty of self-awareness. The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which can connote knowledge, consciousness, or apperception.

[3] Banham, Reyner. The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.