Jordi Vivaldi

Today our cultural landscape is populated by a series of others whose ecological, biological, geological or algorithmic nature can no longer be reduced to that of the human. The latter has lost its modern condition of subject, that is, its condition of being an ontologically privileged object. In this scenario, the human has become “a nomad assembly in a shared life space that it does not control or own. S/he just occupies it, always in community with biological, technological and cultural others.” The discipline of architecture is no exception: in the last years, the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI) in architectural design is profoundly altering the latter’s method and performance. Despite the uncertainty that orbits around its generalisation in our daily practice, in most cases, design processes associated with AI are intimately associated with a Prometheic agenda particularly concerned with notions such as improvement, optimization, automatisation, efficiency, monitoring, adaptation, calculation, or self-regulation. Through the notion of Living Architecture, the seminar attempts to complexify this agenda by constructing cultural narratives theorizing on the aesthetical, political, philosophical and historical dimension of AI’s arrival into architecture.