Where are we heading?
New advances in digital technology promise new ways of interacting with each other, new ways of sensing the world, and new ways of extending our abilities. We work remotely, our houses are controlled through our phones, and soon our cars will be able to drive themselves. Advances are being made every day in automated technologies such as self-driving cars, facial recognition, and robotics. At the same time, there is a steady stream of speculations on the legal and ethical questions at stake, and we are regularly warned that labour as we know it is coming to an end. Many of these developments are an outcome of the most recent wave of research in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Due in no small part to the work of Professor Geoffrey Hinton and others at the University of Toronto, AI promises a seemingly endless set of transformations to everything from medicine to the cities that we inhabit.

Why are we going?
While the application of these new algorithms in architecture has been limited, we can imagine a series of possible future trajectories. For example, will ‘reinforcement learning’ algorithms enable building systems to become self-managing, leading to new kinds of dynamic and responsive architectures? Should new methods of search and ‘pattern recognition’ encourage us to rethink the role of the computer in the design process, allowing us access to relevant precedents and facilitating navigation through design spaces? Can new agent-based simulations enable more robust forms of testing and analysis during the design process?

Have we been here before?
Given the boom and bust cycle of funding and development in AI, we might do well to retain some skepticism towards the latest claims. With each thawing of what critics call an ‘AI winter’, architects such as Cedric Price and Nicholas Negroponte, have taken an interest in the role these technologies could play in design. Throughout these cycles, popular culture has continued to explore the theme of artificial intelligence – characters such as HAL9000 force us to question the reality of AI and its relation to sentience. Indeed, we can trace this literary fascination with automata back as far as Homer’s description of Hephaestus’ tripods in ‘The Iliad’. Between these architectural and literary references, can we situate ourselves in order to move forward?

Through a series of cumulative exercises during the semester, students will develop architectural proposals for a specialized research facility at the University of Toronto – the Vector Institute. In March of 2017, the University of Toronto collaborated with private industry, the Government of Canada, and the Government of Ontario to launch the Vector Institute – an independent, non-profit research institution dedicated to the transformative field of artificial intelligence (vectorinstitute.ai). Building on the University of Toronto’s historical strength in artificial intelligence research, the Institute aims at to build: physical infrastructure for cutting-edge computing and data analysis, teaching spaces and student facilities, and spaces supporting promotion and knowledge transfer. In this studio, we will explore recent advances in digital design technology, in performance simulation, and in artificial intelligence. We will work to situate these into a broader discussion around the state of computational design methods while designing an architectural housing for the Vector Institute.