Architecture and information technology a conceptual framework

Key Note speech at the conference Intelligent Environments IE

An obvious result of the act of liberation is the presence of extremely more efficient buildings, with respect to the past, from the exquisitely functional point of view. At times these buildings are also much more intriguing, certainly more capable of dialoging with the different contexts in which they are inserted and, despite how incomprehensible they may appear in the beginning given their apparent formal richness, basically just as realizable. The core of the IT revolution is not so much bits of data, their immense number and constant change ability, as much as the capability of these informational atoms to be interconnected, interrelated. We are navigating through a moment of passage from an earlier phase of IT application in its most evident and superficial aspects (i.e. the ease of processing complex geometries, the control of assembling and managing data and the presence of the communicative load in architecture) toward a much more mature phase in which information technology enters directly into the essence itself of architecture. The challenge facing us is not only one of creating an architecture that is narrative and metaphorical, as is part of all today's architecture, but how to create an architecture that can incorporate this complex, interrelated, changing and extremely dynamic level that characterizes the fulcrum of the IT paradigm. The real problem, as always, is not of a technical nature, (easy and almost banal), but rather an esthetic nature.