IUIC 2014 - Intelligent USERS//Intelligent CITIES II (IUIC'14)

Since the beginning of the previous century, architecture, as well as the other representative arts, started wondering about the then emerging proliferation of technology and the form of the city and the building in a technologically developed world (e.g., La Citta Nuova by Antonio Sant’Elia, Metropolis by Fritz Lang).
Gradually, the representative arts became a battleground for the new laws of urban perception, rising uncanny visions of a world, dealing with future problems, giving the reins of humanity to an unknown technologically driven force. The chaotic experience of spatial incoherence and disorientation ? characteristics of the new technological metropolis ? seemed to be the favorite subject of all the auteurs and creators.
The work of visionary architects in Europe in the ‘60s, such as Archigram, Hans Hollein, Coop Himmelblau, Raimund Abraham and others, criticizing modernism ? whose social aspirations had been absorbed by the same bureaucratic system that it initially hoped to transform ? created a new generation of architects, questioning whether the ‘building’ was worthwhile discussing; the object of architecture became the subject himself*. At the same time, the ‘new man’ was rejecting the machine age, mass production, efficiency, standardization, repetition, the “machine aesthetic”, etc.
Today, the architectural quest has shifted from being an endeavor on the formalistic expression (quest of form) to a different one, the one of branding the city. Modernity’s perception that even the habitat is a machine to live in is taken to the extreme with the proliferation of technology, thus moving perception from ubiquitous computing and connectivity to a ubiquitous sense of habitat. Yet, the same questions remain; who is the user and in which mixed realities or hybrid spaces can be found. A topological-based quest upon which architecture provides the means to embark.
The main goal of the workshop is to first identify users of intelligent environments by giving them characteristics, and then recognize the parameters that establish the city as an intelligent environment, using among our main research instruments the representative arts.