With artificial intelligence, architectural agency shifts, no longer confined to buildings but unfolding within broader fields of interaction and evolving environments. This shift is not merely technical; it reconfigures the conditions under which architecture operates, entangling design with new regimes of knowledge and power. In this light, humanistic computation becomes a horizon through which questions of authorship, responsibility, and judgment are reopened. Drawing on projects that span planetary networks, hybrid environments, and artificial processes of design, this keynote traces the emergence of agentic and transscalar architectures, where human intuition is confronted with increasingly autonomous forms of machine intelligence.
This talk outlines NCTU’s early involvement in CAADRIA and its three research areas: CAD/CAM fabrication, virtual space, and human-computer design thinking. Bridging the gap between academia and practice, several building projects and exhibitions have been executed. To further promote digital trends in architecture, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, and Frank Gehry were invited to design three museums.
Nature never intends to be creative, while its mere creativity never stops engaging our admiration. Not only does it create millions of life forms that exude absolute beauty and delicacy, but all its creations fit into a ceaselessly elaborate network that begs the question of how such engineering could even exist.
The “mind” behind all this we call: Biological intelligence. There is a great similarity between architecture and life form. They are both made of skin, supporting structures and life-sustaining organs. They are both interconnected and driven by intrinsic energies as well as external pressures. Life itself is originated from single cell organism that eventually evolved into tens of millions of species through genetic mutations (intrinsic energies) and nature’s selections (exterior pressures). Architecture began with the fundamental principal of providing shelter with primitive materials and evolved, through main selection, into metropolises with varieties of functions that can accommodate tens of millions of people. It is the response to the needs of an ever-evolving human civilization that fuels the evolution of architecture. For BAF, we seek to explore the underlying mysteries of this billion-year-old intelligence and learn to create architecture that parallels how nature creates itself.
We humans are defined by the overlapping relationships to the natural world from which we grew and the technological world we are creating. Our uneasy and evolving position at the boundary between these two worlds will shape much of what it means to be human in the decades ahead. As AI and systems approaches expand the imaginative, sensorial, and disciplinary scope of design, computational designers can embrace the challenges of shaping not only tools but techno-natural interfaces. Through a series of projects that explore themes of planetary imagination, radical reuse, generative reassembly, synthetic natures, and machine imagination, we can glimpse the special role that computational design can play in charting our uniquely human place at the nexus between natural and technological worlds.
