ArqTech

What is called forth are new and catalytic opportunities for architecting the future and restoring the damaged environment. These tasks may require Human Enhancement Technologies (HETs) emerging as central to understanding the symbolic and material relationship between nature and human consciousness and activity, alongside the development of technoscience. Our exploratory line of research will consist in outlining a study hypothesis that we could call the "architecture of the future". In other words, what architecture (in a normative, social, and structural sense) would be appropriate for technologies to be developed, distributed, and applied with a view primarily to collective environmental benefits and, therefore, to the promotion of social justice. In line with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (2030 Agenda), the ArqTech research group aims to explore and develop the relationship between architecture, philosophy, and technics, seeking to involve other fields of knowledge that are implicated in this debate, pertaining to the tension between planetary sustainability, based on rethinking the integrity of the four primordial elements (water, fire, air, earth) and the needs of our hyper-technological society. Thinking about all these vectors in interdependence, alongside visions of the future, implies starting from this space between architecture and philosophy, and equally taking under consideration ethics, technology, and ecology. The emergence of digital media in design has incurred profound changes in the profession and practice of architecture and carries the promise of allowing complex calculations and intricate problem-solving using algorithmic applications. Architects may assume an important role in the environmental challenges that our era involves by becoming curators of a set of options from which they are summoned to select and by releasing control of the design process to software. Thus, they achieve a design that is contrary to the ethics of statics and favors a dynamic adaptation of building forms to the constantly changing demands of contemporary multicultural societies. Buildings and constructions which are not programmed to last forever but venture to incorporate techniques for obsolescence, dismantling, ruination, recycling, and abandonment through time, are eventually more environmentally sustainable. Architecture engaging with digital design incorporates factors of time and motion via transformation and deformation at the very moment of formal conception to aspire to a new one.

We invite all interested in engaging in this line of research to get in touch with us to develop ideas and projects together.