So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.

... You would [...] ful�ll all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure during your sleep. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great”. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it's going to be.

And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. �en you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And �nally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.

(Alan Watts, �e Dream of Life)

Do I dream my own dreams?

At the root of the problem with parametri-cist neoliberalism and its obsession with a completely computer-controlled urban landscape is its blind reliance on the dualism between the mind and the body, the idea that the mind is separate from its ‘vehicle’ the body and not in�uenced by the experi-ences to which the body grants it permis-sion. A consequence of this belief is the idea that advertising does not shape people’s wants and dreams, or that building would be, as di Quadri claims, a mundane task.

Instead of seeing the body as a container for our minds, we ought to see it in Elisabeth Grosz' words as a Möbius strip connecting interior and exterior in an endless uncontrolla-ble drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside [and] as the threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal point of binary pairs (Grosz, Volatile Bodies 1994).

In this conception, the snow�ake city responds immediately to our needs and wants, and hence becomes a seamless addition/prothesis to our bodies. In the same way that I don’t control most of my bodily functions, we will not directly control most of the city’s functions.

It follows, then, that the snow�ake city is

also a seamless addition to our minds, the individual constituents of society. And in this model, the building≠society dualism is invalid.

A society that concerns itself less with building concerns itself less with itself. 

Do we wish to converge our collective consciousness towards a singular uniform subjectivity?

Instead of seeing the AI-rchitect as an almighty facilitator of human life, let’s see it for what it actually is: a incredibly handy tool for architects that alleviates us from the unwanted labour of our profession so that we can focus on what interests us - what we regard as play. �is does not make us less of architects, but instead enables everyone to become more of architect/builders - as di Quadri says, one architect per capita. �e power of shaping society that in�uences our minds is now suddenly in our own hands: an architecture of radical dehierarchisation and pluralisation. 

For this version of our parametric future to be realised, the initiators of the snow�ake city need to be personal (or even sub-person-al: several initiators for your own contradic-tory dreams and wants). �is would generate a parametrical snow crash of contradictory architecture actualising the totality of our con�ictual sociocultural di�erences, destratifying the city and spawning endless serendipities. 

But what will our work look like?

In this scenario, the AI-rchitect creates architecture that responds to social situations, replacing the architect as a profes-sional who traditionally had done the same. �is means that the human actors in those situations are ultimately themselves unaware architects, feeding the AI-rchitect with input. But relieved of his duties, the architect isn’t necessarily banished to ‘leisure’ - instead he takes a di�erent professional position in society.

Our role as ‘designers’ is to ‘design’ or initiate radical situations that break the status quo and prevents the snow�ake city from turning into an ice castle. Not much di�erent from what we do today, just on a di�erent scale of agency. And I guess this is what most of us regard as play - to remove this ludic aspect from society would be contradictory since this is our form of ludicity. Let the man concern himself with whatever he regards as  play, and let the machine assist him in this, but do not let the machine decide what his  concept of  play entails. 

I suppose that here Benjamin Bratton would add that we should also let the machine concern itself with what it regards as play, and well, why not?

Jakob Sköte is a third year student at the AA. He is co-founder of AAgora, along with Francesco Catemario di Quadri, Stanislas Turcon, Sahir Patel, and Ashirai Zeyn Musikavanhu.

aagora.aaschool.ac.ukfacebook.com/AAgoraLondon@AAgoraLondon

P N Y XWEEKLY COMMENTARY, RESEARCH, AND REVIEW

January 26 2016 ISSUE 14

our every need lead to a stagnant society?

In this vision, there is the implication that we can create/code a machine/algorithm that would be able to analyse any given social situation and ‘snow�ake out’ a relevant architectural response. But even if we, against all socio-cultural odds, manage to create a machine that was not �avoured/�awed by a white/male/western/essen-tialist hegemony, and that would actually adhere to any kind of corporeal need, these responses would always have to be a compromise between the di�erent needs of the diverse participants in the given situation.

Our wants and needs - the igniters of social situations - are not primordial constants of human existence, but a product of the social situations and spaces which we inhabit in an endless feedback loop - this is what consti-

tutes society. But in the utopia above, the AI-rchitect responds to our social situations with a perfect architectural solution that, in turn, in�uences us and the nature of our next

social situation, and so on, until stability is reached. A self-a�rming system,

per de�nition, converges towards equilibrium. And so

the snow�ake city turns into an ice-castle of repetition, diminishing the possibili-ties of one’s life by being in constant compromise with

everyone else’s. And because it is focused on facilitating the

common and watered- down denominators of our concept of play,

or ‘leisure', it prevents any social mobility.Is this safeguarded ludic utopia, typi�ed by

the portrayal of the human race in Pixar’s Wall-E, really, as di Quadri claims, a facilitator for the enrichment of our spiritual life (Nobert Wiener)? Alan Watts old speech comes to mind:

ON Friday 29th Janurary, the AA’s new debating society AAgora will open their inaugural debate ‘Arkitect ist tot’. As a prelude to the debate, this week we feature a reply from Jakob Sköte to Francesco Catemario di Quadri’s own contribution to PNYX late last year on the same theme: the impending automation of the architectural discipline and the redundancy of the �gure of the architect herself.

ABOLISH THE ARCHITECT:RISE AND SHINE Jakob Sköte

Can  ‘architecture' be separated from  ‘society’ and is it really a burden? 

THIS is a reply to Francesco Catemario di Quadri’s text ABOLISH THE ARCHITECT: RISE THE MACHINE (PNYX Issue 9, October 29, 2015). I �rst want to state that I do not wish to counter di Quadri’s assertion that the near-future our discipline will be totally automated. Yes, the AI-rchitect  will take what we currently de�ne as our  jobs - and honestly, did you really want to be a CAD-monkey at Fosters in the �rst place? And yes, in the foreseeable future we will see cities that will grow like snow�akes over night - just go over and check out what the Digital Research Laboratory (DRL) at the AA is up to. However, there is an assumption behind these utopian perspectives on our parametric future that I �nd problematic.

�e neoliberal naivety in the belief that this Larry Page’s New Babylon would ever be a free society implemented in our current political and cultural landscape is for another discussion. Instead, the problem I wish to discuss is di Quadri’s claim that a society focused on maximising ‘leisure’ would be a fruitful strategy in transcending from Homo Faber to Homo Ludens (man at play), such as that realised by the sex- and food-indulging gerbils of Nicholas Negroponte’s experiment ‘Blocksworld’.

Doesn’t an architecture focused on facilitating

Edited by Adolfo Del Valle & Oskar Johanson. Printed by Two Press, London for the Architectural Association / pnyx.aaschool.ac.uk / pnyx@aaschool.ac.uk © PNYX 2016

Nicholas Negroponte with the Architecture Machine ‘Blocksworld’ (1970)

So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.

... You would [...] ful�ll all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure during your sleep. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great”. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it's going to be.

And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. �en you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And �nally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.

(Alan Watts, �e Dream of Life)

Do I dream my own dreams?

At the root of the problem with parametri-cist neoliberalism and its obsession with a completely computer-controlled urban landscape is its blind reliance on the dualism between the mind and the body, the idea that the mind is separate from its ‘vehicle’ the body and not in�uenced by the experi-ences to which the body grants it permis-sion. A consequence of this belief is the idea that advertising does not shape people’s wants and dreams, or that building would be, as di Quadri claims, a mundane task.

Instead of seeing the body as a container for our minds, we ought to see it in Elisabeth Grosz' words as a Möbius strip connecting interior and exterior in an endless uncontrolla-ble drift of the inside into the outside and the outside into the inside [and] as the threshold or borderline concept that hovers perilously and undecidably at the pivotal point of binary pairs (Grosz, Volatile Bodies 1994).

In this conception, the snow�ake city responds immediately to our needs and wants, and hence becomes a seamless addition/prothesis to our bodies. In the same way that I don’t control most of my bodily functions, we will not directly control most of the city’s functions.

It follows, then, that the snow�ake city is

also a seamless addition to our minds, the individual constituents of society. And in this model, the building≠society dualism is invalid.

A society that concerns itself less with building concerns itself less with itself. 

Do we wish to converge our collective consciousness towards a singular uniform subjectivity?

Instead of seeing the AI-rchitect as an almighty facilitator of human life, let’s see it for what it actually is: a incredibly handy tool for architects that alleviates us from the unwanted labour of our profession so that we can focus on what interests us - what we regard as play. �is does not make us less of architects, but instead enables everyone to become more of architect/builders - as di Quadri says, one architect per capita. �e power of shaping society that in�uences our minds is now suddenly in our own hands: an architecture of radical dehierarchisation and pluralisation. 

For this version of our parametric future to be realised, the initiators of the snow�ake city need to be personal (or even sub-person-al: several initiators for your own contradic-tory dreams and wants). �is would generate a parametrical snow crash of contradictory architecture actualising the totality of our con�ictual sociocultural di�erences, destratifying the city and spawning endless serendipities. 

But what will our work look like?

In this scenario, the AI-rchitect creates architecture that responds to social situations, replacing the architect as a profes-sional who traditionally had done the same. �is means that the human actors in those situations are ultimately themselves unaware architects, feeding the AI-rchitect with input. But relieved of his duties, the architect isn’t necessarily banished to ‘leisure’ - instead he takes a di�erent professional position in society.

Our role as ‘designers’ is to ‘design’ or initiate radical situations that break the status quo and prevents the snow�ake city from turning into an ice castle. Not much di�erent from what we do today, just on a di�erent scale of agency. And I guess this is what most of us regard as play - to remove this ludic aspect from society would be contradictory since this is our form of ludicity. Let the man concern himself with whatever he regards as  play, and let the machine assist him in this, but do not let the machine decide what his  concept of  play entails. 

I suppose that here Benjamin Bratton would add that we should also let the machine concern itself with what it regards as play, and well, why not?

Jakob Sköte is a third year student at the AA. He is co-founder of AAgora, along with Francesco Catemario di Quadri, Stanislas Turcon, Sahir Patel, and Ashirai Zeyn Musikavanhu.

aagora.aaschool.ac.ukfacebook.com/AAgoraLondon@AAgoraLondon

Edited by Adolfo Del Valle & Oskar Johanson. Printed by Two Press, London for the Architectural Association / pnyx.aaschool.ac.uk / pnyx@aaschool.ac.uk © PNYX 2016

our every need lead to a stagnant society?

In this vision, there is the implication that we can create/code a machine/algorithm that would be able to analyse any given social situation and ‘snow�ake out’ a relevant architectural response. But even if we, against all socio-cultural odds, manage to create a machine that was not �avoured/�awed by a white/male/western/essen-tialist hegemony, and that would actually adhere to any kind of corporeal need, these responses would always have to be a compromise between the di�erent needs of the diverse participants in the given situation.

Our wants and needs - the igniters of social situations - are not primordial constants of human existence, but a product of the social situations and spaces which we inhabit in an endless feedback loop - this is what consti-

tutes society. But in the utopia above, the AI-rchitect responds to our social situations with a perfect architectural solution that, in turn, in�uences us and the nature of our next

social situation, and so on, until stability is reached. A self-a�rming system,

per de�nition, converges towards equilibrium. And so

the snow�ake city turns into an ice-castle of repetition, diminishing the possibili-ties of one’s life by being in constant compromise with

everyone else’s. And because it is focused on facilitating the

common and watered- down denominators of our concept of play,

or ‘leisure', it prevents any social mobility.Is this safeguarded ludic utopia, typi�ed by

the portrayal of the human race in Pixar’s Wall-E, really, as di Quadri claims, a facilitator for the enrichment of our spiritual life (Nobert Wiener)? Alan Watts old speech comes to mind:

ON Friday 29th Janurary, the AA’s new debating society AAgora will open their inaugural debate ‘Arkitect ist tot’. As a prelude to the debate, this week we feature a reply from Jakob Sköte to Francesco Catemario di Quadri’s own contribution to PNYX late last year on the same theme: the impending automation of the architectural discipline and the redundancy of the �gure of the architect herself.

ABOLISH THE ARCHITECT:RISE AND SHINE Jakob Sköte

Can  ‘architecture' be separated from  ‘society’ and is it really a burden? 

THIS is a reply to Francesco Catemario di Quadri’s text ABOLISH THE ARCHITECT: RISE THE MACHINE (PNYX Issue 9, October 29, 2015). I �rst want to state that I do not wish to counter di Quadri’s assertion that the near-future our discipline will be totally automated. Yes, the AI-rchitect  will take what we currently de�ne as our  jobs - and honestly, did you really want to be a CAD-monkey at Fosters in the �rst place? And yes, in the foreseeable future we will see cities that will grow like snow�akes over night - just go over and check out what the Digital Research Laboratory (DRL) at the AA is up to. However, there is an assumption behind these utopian perspectives on our parametric future that I �nd problematic.

�e neoliberal naivety in the belief that this Larry Page’s New Babylon would ever be a free society implemented in our current political and cultural landscape is for another discussion. Instead, the problem I wish to discuss is di Quadri’s claim that a society focused on maximising ‘leisure’ would be a fruitful strategy in transcending from Homo Faber to Homo Ludens (man at play), such as that realised by the sex- and food-indulging gerbils of Nicholas Negroponte’s experiment ‘Blocksworld’.

Doesn’t an architecture focused on facilitating

Self and other as coplanar concepts (diagram by the author)