What happens when the sensor-imbued city acquires the ability to see – almost as if it had eyes? Ahead of the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section at the Biennial to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies – and Artificial Intelligence in particular – might impact architecture and urban life. Here you can read the “Eyes of the City” curatorial statement by Carlo Ratti, the Politecnico di Torino and SCUT.
The human body, at least in terms of anthropomorphic ideals, was in the centre of western architectural debates from Greco-Roman times up to the Renaissance. Although the very concept of the body didn't come as explicit in traditional architecture writing in the east, the notion that the body (or, the envelope of the soul) connects the mind and the physical world was constantly revisited and reinterpreted.
In his mid-18th-century masterpiece, Laugier proposed the idea of comfort, or convenience, as one of the pillars of the essence of architecture, linking the human body (physics) with architecture necessity, albeit more from a scientific point of view. While this approach may have helped the human body to remain architecturally relevant in a world rapidly moving to industrialisation and modernisation, its reductivist mentality could do little to the marginalisation of the same topic, when the visual (of architecture and cities) eventually ruled in mass consumerism culture, both in late industrial and post-industrial times.
