Towards a More-than-digital architecture

The transition from the Age of Information to the Digital Era has been a shifting paradigm from anonymous mass consumption to individual customization, that has today become the most common model in the society (Negroponte, 1995). Because of its attitude of translating the values that each society exploits with a time-and-space-specific point of view, architecture has incorporated the digital transition, or the so-called Second Digital turn, trying to adapt its methodology to an exclusively technologically-driven approach. The old dichotomies ‘architecture-science’ and ‘man-machine’ have become in the last decades more profound, especially with the introduction of AI and Generative Adversarial Network processes. The use of Big Data, together with these two semi-automatic approaches, has stressed the point of the influence of form-finding process -instead of the ‘problem-understanding’ and ‘question-asking’- in the com-position of the architectural design. The evolution of digital technologies seems to be going faster every day, whilst architecture has often passively absorbed the results carried out by the digital world (Carpo, 2017). Our homes are becoming so increasingly embedded and filled with Iot devices and elements that, architectural design may incorporate not just the technologies brought up by these devices, but the broader sense of digital diffuse networks that allow defining a relationship with them (Ratti, 2016). From the micro-scale of the technological components to the macro-level of the city (or the infrastructure), passing by the scale of the building, a project that is able to adapt to the needs of its users and that can collaborate with them, will explore the potentiality of a newer way to conceive the mingling of architecture and techno-science in the whole design com-position process.