The architecture of the 21st century will be the first that is part of natural history.

The machineries of consumption and appropriation of the environment and its resources are pushing the global habitat toward collapse from exhaustion. The direct consequence of an age in which economic growth inevitably entailed physical growth.
Architecture and the city are the interface that we have provided ourselves with in order to interact with the world. At the local and the global scale.

Is it possible to define a general theory of multiscalar habitability on which we can live our lives in the decades to come?

We make the world fit for us to inhabit by means of functional nodes linked by networks that structure a once natural environment. A networked world.

Architecture is the functional precipitation of activities in a place. Ordered crystals, condensers of micro worlds. Condensation of knowledge.

If recent history has been constructed on the basis of centralized systems of energy, information or production, the new history will be constructed on the basis of distributed, decentralized systems, by way of operational nodes —people, things, places, territories— that cooperate freely in order to be more efficient.

What is the architecture for distributed systems like?

As in all mutations, the saturation of the city’s vital systems leads to their re-programming on the basis of principles that are closer to those of information systems than the simple accumulation of inorganic matter.

Time and, with it, speed serve to define the rhythm of interaction between people and their environment. A new material in project design.

More ordered information creates a world that is more specific, not more generic.

A world capable of accumulating history inside itself. What makes us human beings, not bacteria, is that our cells have managed to conserve information about their history through each mutation.

To construct anywhere on the planet is to submit the site to structural changes, which should be the product of the emerging relationships with the place, like a geological process of saturation or erosion.

More connected information generates more nature.

The re-programming of the world occurs when a fine informational rain is capable of drenching every element on the planet, endowing it with a digital identity, enabling it to interact with other elements by means of decentralized relational protocols.

In this way we create living organisms, never again inert, that react to specific geographies and mutate, where appropriate, in response to external influences.

Rather than being a client node in a network, then, architecture is an entity that tends toward the connected self-sufficiency characteristic of natural systems.

Buildings as trees. Cities as forests.

Are architects, architects of information architecture?

The citizens, instead of being the consumers of information, are its creators.
The citizens, instead of being the consumers of architecture, can be its constructors.

Is architecture an iconic or a systemic activity?

Finally, every object we design and construct on the planet forms part of a functional network that connects the different scales of habitability.
1, 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000, 10,000,000, 100,000,000, 1,000,000,000, 10,000,000,000 people organize themselves by programming their relationship with the other scales by way of relational systems whose structure defines the cultural values of each society. From a book to the Library of Congress; from a lamp to a nuclear power station; from a crucifix to the Vatican.

Any object, any building is ultimately the physical representation of an information node.

The construction of a dwelling, a block or a city is part of the same project of multiscalar habitability.
To change the history of the world is to change the history of the scalar relations between the functional networks of habitability.

Architecture can remain in the realm of fashion, as an activity that acts on the surface of things, or it can lead this structural transformation through which we can help to write a new history of the world.

Vicente Guallart. Jul 2008