Speculation on large urban populations’ occupational patterns have become paramount to anticipate the growing demands of ever larger concentrations of people in more reduced living quarters.  By maximizing density, the ratio of service typologies to recreational and living spaces, have become a latent need in deciphering the livable city. Self Learning computational models, or Artificially Intelligent Simulations, can aid in simulating future scenarios which we are yet to foresee, to begin studies of the pressures a city of more than 10 million might exert upon natural resources, infrastructure, the services industry and the built environment, as well as growth patterns as a city grows to benchmark amounts - 1 million, 2.5 million, 5 million, - 10 million.  In an attempt to decipher strong guidelines for a more sustainable growth sequence, custom software's ability to program autonomous units and simulate their interactions, can serve to speculate on events of ever-higher resolutions: from the regional growth interactions including natural and human resource management, to the interactions between buildings and urban blocks, as well as the pressures exerted by human communities and special interests as a more granular but widespread level of influence upon the city. By visually recreating these scenarios, as reactive units of code, architecture can gain a higher resolution perspective on the inner workings of these stages of city growth. As opposed to current models of projection based solely on statistics, the new architect/programmers can afford us a deeper view on the development of these statistical patterns applied in space, projected digitally throughout the city.  These perspectives allow statistical percentages to be expanded upon to depict local concentrations of demographics, of commerce, recreation, migration patterns, and their interrelations with weather patterns, as they become models capable of changing, interacting and self-regulating through large scale time intervals.

Computer aided design has become the base standard for the creative industries' needs to accelerate and expand their production pipelines. And while these computation clusters enable a plethora of technical and practical endeavours, the theoretical frameworks by which these softwares are designed take a second plane.  Theoretical writings on the possibilities of autonomous computation units, such as those of Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Stephen Wolfram, John Frazer, among others, can aid in expanding the roles and possible uses we are yet to imagine design having within the built environment. Programming Paradigms, such as: Procedural, Object-Oriented, and Symbolic Programming, serve as philosophical building blocks, by following much the same principles of logic derived by Aristoteles and Descartes, and are organized in leibnizian monadic clusters, as further elaborated by german enlightenment philosophers. These thought frameworks become complementary clusters capable of being synthesized as large data sets, as opposed to current frameworks for managing theory which are largely dependent upon observational techniques founded in the seventeenth century's frameworks for analysis and synthesis.  These thought processes for redacting conclusions upon observed phenomena seem seldom adept at managing the massive amounts of data basic processes such as population behaviour, migration, nature input processing, and economic exchanges, among others are dependent upon.  Algorithms for sorting and managing information developed by giants such as Google seem unnoticed in architectural theory, these however, offer a powerful framework for processing and drawing conclusions from large amounts of input, in any field.  Algorithmic processes, as those exposed by pioneers of computation, can not only aid in design, but actively aid in generating understanding from a wide variety of sources. This paper seeks to explore possible algorithms, outcomes, and implications for the role of these tools within theoretical synthesis, with the purpose of expanding the tools by which we create theory

Among the most discussed topics within current discourse on the built environment is the topic of adaptation. Adaptation to future uses, to new users, to changing culture, to global culture, to technological advances, environmental input, and to ameliorate the environmental imprint. However, in contrast, our tools for teaching and illustrating adaptive behaviours within architecture, has been aided by representative tools. Representation as the static snapshot of a moment in time of a built reality, which neither interacts with the environment, nor is it thought from the vantage point that each building processes data (whether it be visitors, energy, technologies, or human interactions).  The 2D, 3D, digital and analogue tools of architecture mostly depend on static, representational modes of understanding. And while the digital technologies being used have made some advances to counteract these modes of understanding, by introducing parametric software, and solar and GPS data within current software packages, adaptation through analogue models, are seldom explored. Models of architecture insist in much the same inert materials as a century ago, cardboard, paper, acrylic, and wood.  Time-based approaches to depicting architectural functions across time can afford us a glimpse into a building’s capacity for change, for reuse, adaptation to natural cycles, to structural resiliency or propensity to collapse, reacting to occupational patterns by time of day, and unplanned contextual changes. This allows for an architectural education where causality and codependency between factors for design is key, as students are forced by the materials they use to encounter and resolve scenarios where buildings are capable of change as their initial purposes change. By way of examples, material techniques and speculations, we'll seek to make the case for a new material and software palette through which to explore adaptation in the built environment, not only at the component scale, but at the building, and urban scale, as well.

Noted economist Jeremy Rifkin, introduced the term Web 3.0 - a future scenario in which exchanges through the internet will not only be telecommunications based, in bits and bytes, but that a parallel internet of energy will exist, in terms of watts. As buildings become more adept at absorbing energy from the environment through the myriad of technologies in development (solar, wind, hydrogen, wave, biomass, etc.), the surplus of energy in any one region of the world, will be able to emit that energy to any other region of the world. This scenario raises the topic of future patterns of distributed energy exchange, and the question of the changing anatomy of buildings in cityscape as they are forced to metabolize and exchange energy. This scenario brings forth implications where energy regulations will be synonymous with regulations in the built environment, city planning, resource management, and the capacity for city growth.  It becomes a self-regulating system where balance is demanded, and power is re-distributed from those having the machinery to exploit, to those having a sustainable balance and placement within their natural context. The dynamics inherent in this trans-urban energy exchange, are responsible for creating an economic landscape of interdependency across nations with varying natural assets and those high-density regions where the energy is consumed. This effectively intertwines architecture, economics, and energy, as one. What shape will these cities take? What effects will they have among their citizens? What exchange patterns will they create? What will be the new role of public space? Who gathers energy? Who emits? We are yet to foresee.  Through principles of city growth, planning and urbanism we can project initial circumstances this change in energy paradigm might bring, as well as with the aid of sociological frameworks for analysis, we can speculate on the possible changes in geopolitical relations this may enable.

The ways in which we perceive nature are radically different from a century ago. Quantified, organized, hierarchized and sorted before they enter our retina, the tools we use for measuring, scanning, and reconstructing nature enable a mediated perception of natural phenomena.  It is a very distinct nature we perceive through a computer screen, a selectively synthesized conglomerate of information upon which we build our structures.  Where we build through a digital nature constructs that are imposed on the actual environment.  Temperature, humidity, heat, sunlight sensors, and topography scanners help recreate the foundations for urban, planning, resource management, and architecture proposals within our constructed landscapes.  It is then worth-while noting the inherent differences, advantages and limitations in this new nature to which the construction industry reacts, and its role in shaping our living and exchange spaces. The interface by which these exchanges take place is dependent upon a specific catalogue of intelligence - systems, sensors and materials, which relay and transform all energy gathered, from fixed or static, to polyvalent. It effectively builds atmospherical physics into architecture, and in doing so, changes the role of buildings from mere shelter for living, exchange and recreation, to one actively involved in studying and harnessing forces from the natural, as well as man-made, environment. This constitutes building as a reactive registry of patterns from the local context. Architecture becomes an active interface for visualizing inner-city weather dynamics at a massively higher resolution than previously thought, as currently visualized from the air. It affords us a new strata of information with two-fold purpose - meteorological and architectural. Within this inner depository of information, the constructed landscape rewrites its classical functions to become an active tool for constructing that which is fleeting or immanent into a manifest form, as local weather becomes a new tool for design.

The role of robotics in the construction of future environments allows for a wide range of alterations for the current processes of construction which take place today.  Current modes of architectural logistics hinge on a strict sequence of design, visualization, planning, project management, and finally construction and maintenance. The role of autonomous units of construction (robots) in, not only shaping our environment, but in reshaping the logistics of construction is on the precipice of becoming a reality.  The possibilities of robotic construction rely not only on their capacity to carry out strict instructions by designers and/or programmers, but in their capacity to sense as they build, and furthermore interpret and react accordingly to that data which they are sensing.  These data sensing capabilities include environmental inputs such as solar, wind, temperature and humidity, among others, but also its immediate context, as well as that which the system has previously constructed.  This can allow for topics of not only automation, but self correction, on-site data analysis which is not humanly visible or quantifiable, and the blending of a reactive construction process with a deliberate instruction-based process.  A scenario where we can imagine a building is constructed by intelligent units as it gathers data and reacts to environmental patterns in-situ, while simultaneously relaying that information to the designer, so that he may further inform the system on its correct behaviour as the process cycle continuously. In this way rewriting the roles of the construction team, the architects and engineers as historically formulated, from thinkers and planners who precede construction, to curators who are capable of creating the system whose rules can be varied locally in time to react continuously to changes in context, thus providing endless variation and architectural responses within the built environment.