In the nineteenth century, entire railway networks became obsolete almost overnight, not due to physical deterioration, but because of changes in the technical standards that supported them. The expansion of railroads across Europe and North America adopted different track gauges (the transverse distance between rails), and as a dominant standard gradually emerged, these infrastructures became incompatible with one another. This required large-scale adaptations, conversions, or even complete reconstruction, in what became known as the "Gauge War."
With the mass adoption of telecommunications networks in the twentieth century, cities around the world built large telephone exchange buildings filled with electromechanical equipment responsible for routing calls between regions. These structures were highly specialized pieces of infrastructure, often occupying entire city blocks and organized around large-scale technical machinery. With the transition to digital switching technologies and, later, the widespread adoption of mobile telephony, much of this equipment became obsolete within a few decades. The buildings themselves often remained structurally sound, but the systems they were designed to support had already evolved beyond them.
Architecture has traditionally been described as a discipline concerned with space, form, and material presence. Yet this understanding becomes increasingly limited when confronted with the conditions that shape contemporary construction. Buildings no longer emerge from a stable relationship between site, program, and material. Instead, they are produced within a dense web of technological systems that operate across territorial, ecological, and temporal scales. Energy networks, data infrastructures, extraction processes, and global logistics shape architecture as decisively as climate or urban context.
Seen from this angle, architecture is less a discrete object than a moment within a larger technical field. Supply chains, data systems, automated maintenance, and energy grids do not sit "behind" the built environment. In a certain way, they influence what can be built, what is affordable, how buildings perform over time, and what kinds of waste they produce. When architecture is assessed primarily through form, it risks overlooking the systems that condition its production and afterlife.
Before the digital turn, architecture's memory was largely tangible. It lived in the weight of drawings, the patina of models, and the thickness of books. To preserve architecture meant to preserve its traces, the documents, sketches, and photographs through which buildings could be remembered long after their material form had changed or disappeared. The modern architectural archive, as it developed in the 20th century, was both a refuge and a device of legitimacy. Institutions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Casa da Arquitectura, or the Deutsches Architekturmuseum were built upon the conviction that to preserve architecture was to preserve its documents.
However, these archives didn't merely store knowledge. They determined what counted as architecture, who belonged to its canon, and how history would be told. To archive is to edit the past — to decide what enters, what is omitted, and how it will be interpreted. The archive, as theorised by Michel Foucault and later by Jacques Derrida, is never neutral; it is an instrument of power, a space that selects and excludes. In architecture, these dynamics are especially evident as they record the visible while silencing what falls outside their categories. The act of collecting has always been, implicitly, an act of judgment.
Not long ago, recent enough to feel current, architecture entered a moment in which buildings became legible as products. The framing offered discipline and a refreshed perspective to an industry that often deems novelty more precious than operational clarity. Nudging exercises of "form" towards repeatability, user experience, performance, and scalability prepared buildings to be a "product" that could now be evaluated. Architecture is more answerable to how well it works, how clearly it communicates its use, and how consistently it delivers its intended experience.
The discipline of product design refreshes the perspectives of architects designing for a changing future. Along with offering a new vocabulary and a rubric for design, the field brings in accountability: a product must perform reliably across time and context. It must hold together as a system of decisions rather than a collection of parts. Quality, therefore, is no longer measured solely by uniqueness, but by consistency and by the ability to produce a predictable experience for its occupants.
Porous City / MVRDV and The Why Factory. Image Courtesy of Frans Parthesius, MVRDV and The Why Factory
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Every architectural epoch has been defined by its instruments. The compass, the drawing board, the camera, and the computer have each altered how architects think and produce. Yet the current moment feels qualitatively different. As artificial intelligence and generative systems enter daily workflows, tools cease to be passive extensions of the architect's hand and begin to operate as semi-autonomous agents. They propose, optimize, and simulate, producing outcomes that are, at times, beyond the author's full anticipation.
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Who designs architecture today? In a professional landscape increasingly defined by collaborative workflows, generative software, and distributed teams, the figure of the architect as a singular creative author feels both anachronistic and inadequate. This article argues that architectural authorship is no longer an individual act, but a collective and distributed condition shaped by institutions, technologies, and shared forms of labor. The transition from individual to collective authorship is not simply a consequence of larger offices or digital tools; it signals a deeper structural shift in how architecture is produced, communicated, and validated.
When architects are still students, a moment often marks a turning point: their first encounter with software. It's not just about learning a tool but discovering a space where ideas transcend physical models, taking shape in a digital environment and beginning a relationship many will carry throughout their careers. What happens next? Software keeps evolving, and with it, the design experience. In recent years, this evolution has accelerated—machine learning, AI, prompts, and integrated workflows have moved from the periphery to the core of design practice, becoming part of the shared language between software and users. As these tools take hold, a key question emerges: How will this reshape our experience of designing architecture in the future?
In the Water Lilies rooms at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, Claude Monet conceived a 360-degree gallery where visitors are enveloped by continuous landscapes, dissolving the boundaries between painting and environment. There, he sought not merely to represent nature through his distinctive style, but to construct an atmosphere, a perceptual state that the visitor literally inhabits. Architecture, traditionally associated with materiality and permanence, thus gains a new dimension of time, movement, and sensory experience.
Similarly, when contemporary architecture transforms its planes into active surfaces, it extends this pursuit of immersion and presence, now amplified by technology. At the entrance of SOPREMA's new Mammut Tower in Oberroßbach, Germany, architecture and digital narrative converge. Designed and executed by ASB GlassFloor, the newly completed lobby is an immersive environment combining glass, light, and sound into a complete spatial and sensorial experience, demonstrating how interactive technologies can become architectural materials in their own right.
Cities today are being reimagined as living, evolving organisms, combining digital intelligence, ecological systems, and new materials to shape radical futures. At Carlo Ratti's "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective." biennial, over 750 participants challenge established boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. Several conceptual projects showcased in the main exhibition challenge conventional boundaries between architecture, landscape, and technology. From bio-adaptive urban systems and Martian water-based settlements to immersive symphonies of satellite data, these works collectively envision new models for cohabitation, resilience, and planetary awareness.
This month's Unbuilt selection presents six speculative projects, presented as part of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale exhibition, as provocations for rethinking the future of cities and human settlement. While some proposals transform architecture into self-sustaining, living infrastructures, others explore how data and sensory interfaces can redefine our relationship with natural and urban environments. Together, they offer a cross-section of how architects and designers are using unbuilt work to imagine new possibilities for life on Earth and beyond.
Artificial intelligence is becoming an undeniable presence in our daily lives. It teaches, generates content, and disrupts the fragile boundaries—both visual and imaginative—that once governed our interactions on social media. On platforms like Instagram, we witness a flood of imagery where every kind of speculative exercise is freely shared, recalibrating our understanding of the relationship between architecture and image. Amid this transformation, entire professions find themselves on uncertain ground, as AI begins to challenge areas once defined by human expertise.
Yet beneath this apparent abundance lies the opaque core of closed-source AI: an algorithmic black box that systematically conceals the origins of the data it consumes. As a result, its outputs are inevitably prone to factual distortions, anachronisms, and subtle or overt biases. This same machinery can hollow out the significance behind the languages and stylistic signatures of canonical architects—manifest, for instance, in AI-generated visions speculating how famed designers, living or dead, might have reimagined the Eiffel Tower. We shared one such image to observe and better understand how people—especially architects—respond to AI's current possibilities and limitations, and the ways it mimics architectural intent. The response was quite fascinating, revealing a mix of curiosity, concern, and critical reflection.
The Pavilion of China at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia presents the exhibition CO-EXIST, curated by Ma Yansong, founder of MAD Architects, and organized by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the People's Republic of China at the Arsenale. Through ten works by twelve interdisciplinary groups, the pavilion examines how traditional Chinese philosophical thought can inform architectural responses in the age of advanced technology and artificial intelligence.
The Master in Advanced Architecture at IAAC celebrates its 25th anniversary as one of the most forward-looking programs in architectural education. Founded in 2000 in Barcelona, the program was created as a space for experimentation—where design meets technology, ecology and critical thinking, far from the conventions of traditional architectural training.
Over the years, the program has welcomed more than 1,000 students from over 80 countries. This international mix is no accident; it reflects IAAC's understanding of innovation as something that grows through dialogue, diversity and shared ambition. The result is a network of professionals working at the intersection of design, research, and systemic change.
The use of technology has become vital in the documentation and conservation of heritage, especially in difficult or urgent circumstances. After many landmarks of the historic city of Palmyra were destroyed during Syria's war in 2015, conservators built three-dimensional digital models of the destroyed city to aid its future reconstruction. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in 2001 with very little prior documentation prompted action in the documentation of vulnerable monuments, such as the establishment of CyArk. More recently, detailed digital surveys and a heritage BIM model were essential in the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris after it was devastated by fire in 2019.
Modernism, a movement that sought to break away from traditional forms and embrace the future, laid the groundwork for many technological and digital advancements in contemporary architecture. As the Industrial Revolution brought about mass production, new materials, and technological innovation, architects like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe championed the ethos of "form follows function" and a rational approach to design. Their principles resonate in the digital age, where computational design and high-tech materials redefine form and construction.
The 20th century's modernist ideals — efficiency, simplicity, and functionality — created a foundation for architects to experiment with structural clarity and material honesty. High-tech architecture, which emerged in the late 20th century, evolved from these principles, merging modernism's clean lines with advanced engineering and technology. This paved the way for parametricism and algorithm-driven design processes, revolutionizing architecture and enabling complex forms previously thought impossible.
For centuries, models have been central to architectural design, providing architects with a tangible way to explore ideas, test concepts, and communicate their vision. From the Renaissance to Modernism, models have been instrumental in the construction and reflection processes, offering insights into form, proportion, and spatial relationships. However, in today's digital age, where 3D modelsand Virtual Reality(VR) have become powerful and efficient tools, the question arises: Are physical models still relevant in contemporary architecture?
Benetton's physical store to mimic its virtual environment. Image Courtesy of Benetton
The evolution of retail design warrants a study of architectural practice in the digital realm. While physical commercial spaces have been the conventional center of shopping experiences, the emergent frontier of the metaverse—an interconnected network of virtual 3D environments—indicates an important shift in brand-consumer interactions. For architects, this liminal space presents a unique canvas, free from the material constraints that have traditionally molded design ideations. The metaverse is a new terrain where the architecture of imagination may be fully realized, inviting a reconceptualization of retail design possibilities.
This article is the fifth in a series focusing on the Architecture of the Metaverse. ArchDaily has collaborated with John Marx, AIA, the founding design principal and Chief Artistic Officer of Form4 Architecture, to bring you monthly articles that seek to define the Metaverse, convey the potential of this new realm as well as understand its constraints.
Science fiction writers inspire us with bold and provocative visions of the future. Huxley, Orwell, Assimov, and Bradbury easily come to mind. They have imagined great advances in technology and oftentimes predicted shifts in social structure that were a result of the human need to open Pandora's Box. A large part of the charm and allure of science fiction is the bold audacity of some of these predictions. They seem to defy the laws of nature and science, and then, faster than you might have thought, the spectrum of human inventiveness makes it so.
