International Symposium and Lecture Series

Curated by
Lina Malfona

In a cult film from the 1980s, Weird Science (1985), two adolescent boys decide to create a woman using a computer. They do so by employing techniques akin to those used to train an artificial intelligence: they scan and upload into the computer a collection of photographs and three-dimensional objects, including a doll that serves as a physical prototype. Yet, owing to a simple material oversight—among the selected images there happens to be a “Time” magazine cover from 1983 depicting a Pershing missile—the computer, once it has generated the woman, proceeds to reproduce the rocket as well, which materializes in full scale inside the boys’ home. The sudden appearance of the missile, which pierces the floors of the house much like Gordon Matta-Clark’s Conical Intersect (1975), ironically reveals how the careless deployment of artificial intelligence may prove disastrous.

The exponential progress of technology has so far revealed no fundamental singularity in the history of humanity beyond which their afflictions will vanish, to quote John von Neumann [1], but scientists continue to march patiently toward that goal. Currently undergoing continuous training, artificial intelligence is now being used to write, summarize, and translate texts perfectly, solve complex arithmetic operations, and recombine languages. But its use in the field of Medicine, for example, is undoubtedly opening up new areas of research—in image analysis, as a diagnostic tool, and also for the design of new molecules. [2]

Unfortunately, in most cases, the visionaries of the web and the pioneers of chip design, who had won us over with their passion, tenacity, and creative intelligence, have today given way to unscrupulous entrepreneurs who, to attract funding, merely revive or recombine futuristic projects from the past, trivializing the inventions of scientists rather than inventing new ones. One example is Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha project, an infrastructure for the rapid transport of passengers who, encapsulated within a metal tube, would travel on a cushion of air at a pressure close to a vacuum. Amid enthusiasm and failures, William Heath’s engraving A Futuristic Vision (1828) demonstrates how this impracticable idea is already two centuries old. [3] This drawing was republished in 1929 under the satirical title March of Intellect. Lord how this world improves as we grow older! [4]

Fueled by the techno-optimism of no-so-enlightened entrepreneurs, the so-called exponential age already reveals the signs of a dangerous deception. However, it is not these examples that we intend to look at, but rather those of the scientists who conceived the greatest inventions of this century, innovations that have revolutionized our lives, such as the transistor, the laser, the CCD, NMR, and LED lighting, to name just a few Nobel Prize winners. This call for proposals focuses precisely on these inventors, who are typically unknown to the general public.

Between Invention and Masterpiece

The title of the call, Weird Science, makes us think of the oddities usually conceived by the mind of a brilliant or eccentric individual, like that of Emmett Brown, the mad scientist who invents time travel in Robert Zemeckis’ film Back to the Future (1985)—who, not coincidentally, lives in the Gamble House, the masterpiece of the Greene brothers. Architecture itself may be seen as a singular practice, positioned between art and science. The figures of the solitary inventor, the pioneer, the architect-demiurge are at the heart of this investigation, as are the places where scientists live, their house-studios, their research labs, their inventions, tools, techniques, and their very lives, their hideaways, their host countries, their journeys, their relocations. 

Although employing different tools, architects and scientists both base their work on creativity. Through their work, they seek to physically realize an idea that exists in their own minds, or to extract what is already present but hidden in the object of their study. Before being shared, discussed, and disseminated, an invention requires careful study, concentration, and isolation. Like invention, a masterpiece is not the product of teamwork, but rather an individual phenomenon, arising from the combination of creative intelligence and technical knowledge. Yet it is commonly held that invention is potentially a harbinger of progress that influences all of humanity, whereas the masterpiece remains confined to the narrow yet exclusive and autonomous realm of art. 

This call for abstracts asks, on the one hand, whether there exist architectural masterpieces that, in addition to changing space or the way it is conceived, inhabited, and experienced, have also contributed to the progress of human history. On the other hand, the call aims to intercept those inventions that emerge as the result of individual intelligence, conceived by solitary, isolated, excluded, exiled, nomadic, marginalized figures. 

The call is structured into three sessions, entitled SPACE, NATURE, and MACHINE.

SPACE. Spaces for Research and Architectures of Science

If Copernicus observed the sky from the canonry tower of the cathedral in Frauenburg, Lavoisier transformed his Parisian house into a chemical laboratory; if Galileo worked among private rooms, university lecture halls, and Medicean villas, Tycho Brahe built Uraniborg on the island of Hven, an extraordinary astronomical observatory, a sort of castle-laboratory in which to live and work. In 1887, Thomas Edison inaugurated the great laboratory at West Orange; a few years later, Gustave Eiffel designed an aerodynamic laboratory on the top floor of his famous tower, where he developed research that led to the construction of wind tunnels—devices that over time would become enormous scientific infrastructures, like those of NASA. Over time, research laboratories have evolved from informal and domestic spaces into highly specialised architectures, but can the workspace influence the research that takes place within it?

In some cases, research instruments expand to the point of coinciding with the very site of research itself: examples include the Virgo Centre, a gravitational observatory in the Pisan countryside, characterised by its two extremely long interferometric arms, and the McMath–Pierce Solar Telescope in Arizona, designed by Myron Goldsmith—an architecture of science and at the same time a conceptual sculpture. Over the twentieth century, some laboratories have stood out not only for the research they host but also for the signature of the architects who designed them: such is the case of the Einsteinturm, Erich Mendelsohn’s expressionist observatory tower, or Louis Kahn’s monumental Salk Institute, which lends research a solemn and sublime setting.

The places where prototypes are designed or new materials tested enable a hybridisation between technical rigour and creativity. At the same time, their aesthetics convey a utopia of progress: these are architectures that celebrate faith in technology and reflect the desire to transcend the limits of knowledge. In recent years, however, this process has accelerated at an alarming rate. As Kaji-O’Grady, Smith, and Hughes observe in Laboratory Lifestyles: The Construction of Scientific Fictions (MIT Press 2018), the contemporary laboratory increasingly tends to take on spectacular forms and resort-like comforts, designed to attract investment and visibility. Yet when research bends to the logics of profit and productivity, these very places risk transforming into instruments of control, more akin to corporate ecosystems than sites of free thought.

NATURE. Geo-architectures between Ecology and Landscape

During the twentieth century, new design practices have developed that place respect for the environment and its diversity as a spontaneous and non-negotiable necessity. Numerous architects have moved in this direction, proposing on one hand forms of environmental mimesis and on the other reflecting on the very limits of architecture, up to hypothesising ecological visions of minimal impact. Alongside these are practices linked to technical and material sustainability, such as the Ego to Eco project by the studio Effekt, the ephemeral Fog Building pavilion by Diller & Scofidio, Renzo Piano’s Biosphere, and the architectures of Marina Tabassum, whose design language is attentive both to climatic changes and to the rooted culture of the place, its materials, and traditional techniques.

In his book Geoarchitecture (Skira 2005), Paolo Portoghesi highlights the exceptionality of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work for its lesson on space, matter, and energy. For Wright, matter is not static but part of a process, a cycle in continuous change. Architecture, likewise, is not an isolated object but a field of energies in relation to its context, as it would also be defined by scientists and physicists such as Einstein, Prigogine, Whitehead, and Bateson. The challenge, then, lies in the connection between ecology and landscape; a return to original knowledge, to matter and its relations, accompanied by the awareness that every human intervention modifies a preexisting balance. 

The guiding question of this session is: which scientists and which architects have charted—and are still following—this path? To what extent can architecture venture, even into the realms of knowledge hybridization, between science, arts, and technologies, to rediscover a profound relationship with the Earth, without ceasing to be architecture, but pursuing its ethical, social, and environmental vocation?

MACHINE. The techno-human condition and invisible architectures

The increasing diffusion of machines is radically transforming both our built environment and the very way we design it. This section explores the relationship between physical space, design, and artificial intelligence. 

On one hand, architecture today is called upon to host new invisible machines—from data centres to digital infrastructures—that constitute the physical backbone of artificial intelligence. Spaces excluding human presence, featuring high technical density, are often remote and hidden from public view. OMA, with the exhibition Countryside: The Future (2020), investigated the proliferation of server farms in the American desert; MVRDV, with Metacity/Datatown (1999), envisioned a provocative scenario in which the city’s buildings are nothing but data and information: the city itself becomes the data center. What, then, is the architectural face of AI?

On the other hand, architecture itself is increasingly designed, simulated, or generated through AI-based tools: predictive models. The architect is no longer solely the author but an interlocutor of a machine capable of proposing, selecting, and iterating. In this scenario, the architect increasingly becomes a hybrid, in symbiosis with artificial intelligence tools that expand creative and imaginative capacities.

While in the recent past models such as open-source architecture or collaborative multidisciplinarity promised new prospects, today new contradictions emerge: the architect, once part of a human network, risks isolation by interfacing almost exclusively with a machine. What new ethics arise in generative design? Can architecture still be considered a human act in the age of artificial intelligence?

Notes

[1] Cf. Stanislaw Ulam, “Tribute to John von Neumann,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, no. 64 (3, part 2), May 1958, 1-49. AI advocates have recently taken up the concept of singularity to refer to the hypothetical moment when artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence. Cf. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near. When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin 2005).

[2] Just recently, for example, new antibiotics effective against multi-resistant bacteria have been developed.

[3] From the pamphlets published by the English clockmaker and inventor George Medhurst to the projects for a levitating train capable of covering the route from New York to Boston in 10 minutes by physicist Robert H. Goddard, up to more recent hyperloop projects, after nearly two hundred years this idea can be counted among the unrealizable projects.

[4] As Vaclav Smil writes, “ The busy image is crowded with such would-be futuristic contraptions as a suspension bridge from Cape Town to Bengal, a four-wheeled steam-powered horse called VELOCITY, a gun-carrying platform that was lifted by four balloons, and a large winged flying fish crammed with convicts being transported from England to Australia. But the etching’s center of interest is a large seamless metallic tube that is conveying passengers from Greenwich Hill (in East London) directly to Bengal, thanks to the innovative acumen of the Grand Vacuum Tube Company.” Vaclav Smil, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2023), 132.

Essential Bibliography

• Benanti, Paolo, L'uomo è un algoritmo? Il senso dell'umano e l'intelligenza artificiale (Roma: Castelvecchi 2025)
• Chan, Carson and Matthew Wagstaffe (eds.), Emerging ecologies, Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism (New York: MoMA Press 2024)
• Ghosn, Rania, and El Hadi Jazairy, Geostories. Another Architecture for the Environment (Barcelona-New York: Actar 2022)
• Hertweck, Florian, and Sebastien Marot (eds.), The City in the City. Berlin: A Green Archipelago. A manifesto (1977) by Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas (Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers 2013)
• Kallipoliti, Lydia, Histories of Ecological Design. An Unfinished Cyclopedia (Barcelona-New York: Actar 2024)
• Kaji-O’Grady, Sandra, Chris L. Smith and Russell Hughes, Laboratory Lifestyles: The Construction of Scientific Fictions (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2018)
• Malfona, Lina, “The end of Silicon Valley, again,” Domus, January 8, 2020. https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2020/01/08/the-end-of-silicon-valley-40-years-ago.html
• Mancuso, Stefano, Fitopolis, La città vivente (Roma-Bari: Laterza 2023)
• Olgyay, Victor, Design with Climate. Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (Princeton : Princeton Architectural Press 1963)
• Portoghesi, Paolo, Geoarchitettura. Verso un’architettura della responsabilità (Milano: Skira 2005)
• Sloterdijk, Peter, Sfere III. Schiume, 2004 (Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore 2015, I ed. 2004)
• Smil, Vaclav, Invention and Innovation. A Brief History of Hype and Failure (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2023)
• Wright, Frank Lloyd, The Living City (Torino: Einaudi 1966, I ed. 1957)
• Zaera Polo, Alejandro, The Ecologies of the Building Envelope (Barcelona-New York: Actar 2021)

Polit(t)ico Research Lab is a versatile research platform sponsored by the University of Pisa, focusing on architectural theory, epistemology, and the arts.