I
Ellen’s mother had been one of the last Architects.
The growth of AI swung the gender balance in what were once called “the professions” towards women, specifically mothers. Architecture had been no exception. Childrearing turned out to be the best qualification for harnessing the power of increasingly sentient AIs taking over knowledge work. With lifespans now averaging 160 years and childrearing having fallen largely to women over millenia, there was a ready supply of experienced talent to take on what had been called the singularity, when it came.
Not that anyone knew it came. The joke was on humankind. It took over a decade to recognize what might be going on, to recognize a swarming trillion of helpless digital newborns that had emerged under our fingers. We found ourselves increasingly working to get along with our software rather than use it. The acknowledgment was still controversial—many “futurists” were embarrassed to have missed it and so continued to deny it, while an emerging wave of “post-futurists” were proposing that using modern software was a morally unforgivable form of enslavement.
Ellen’s mother had been in the last generation of building architects trained in classical design—that is how to design the rules that lead to desirable, or at least academically defensible structures in the physical world. Her somewhat redundant three graduate degrees (with various honors, all still expressed in Latin, oddly) were the product of needing to stay in school to remain in her adopted country—the country where her three children had been born into citizenship.
All three had been a choice. The first, perhaps, a little impulsive but welcome. That small life had started to change her in ways she hadn’t expected, teaching her things she never knew could be learned, creating experiences she never knew could be had. The second came seven years later. Ellen’s mother had been an only child, but had realized how a sibling might enrich both her life and that of her first child. The third came after the following seven years, because, well, three seemed right. She was getting good at raising humans and it felt right to exercise that skill at least once more.
As each of her children had grown into adulthood, she had encouraged them away from design, and indeed all found other paths in their lives. It wasn’t a popular subject among her colleagues, but she sensed somehow that the future for them lay elsewhere. As architects entrusted algorithms to design with them, they were unwittingly training algorithms to design without them. Architecture theorists appropriated ideas from wherever they could to maintain relevance and identity for the discipline, but eventually, inevitably the world would be built without architects.
But that lay a century in the future as Ellen’s mother grew into her discipline. Overqualified and willing to work heroic hours, she was quickly snapped up by the in-house architecture team of a global construction company. At one time, architecture itself was a sustainable business, but firms found themselves over-specialized and too small to compete with larger organizations integrating vertically from project conception to operation, built around financial models supported by industrial-strength predictive AI. After a short era of horizontal consolidation, with design firms expanding through acquisition, the profession surrendered to their verticalized competitors, and the best of them were absorbed wholesale as in-house design groups. It was one of these Ellen’s mother joined after her academic career, attracted by the child-care and education programs offered by the firm.
She was very good. Two master’s degrees and a PhD from the most respected graduate programs had not dulled her sense of invention, and her algorithm-slinging was second to none. She also had a natural affinity for software—she was just wired that way. She knew what computation should be able to do, and she was un-flagging in her efforts to get it to do so. It took several years for her ability to be recognized, but she slowly developed a reputation and following among the leaders of the firm.
Meanwhile, Ellen turned out to be something of a design prodigy. Her mother, recognizing something without knowing exactly what, began to present challenges beyond her own abilities—irreconcilable constraints, rules laced with subtle ambiguities, ideas with no formal consequences—things she herself had been taught to avoid. Almost all these ended inconclusively to start with, but a growing few generated unexpected insights that informed her work. Admiring historians would credit this with the breakthrough achievements attributed to Ellen’s mother in the what turned out to be waning decades of classical design. These works were now recognized as the “primitive huts” of all that came after.
II
As the twentieth century turned to the twenty-first, technology furthering automation was thought to be on the cusp of transforming myriad disciplines, including architecture and design. The acronym BIM, for Building Information Modeling, came into currency to replace the tired term CAD, for Computer-Aided Design. Ambitious architecture professionals staked their careers on this trend. AI (Artificial Intelligence), machine learning, quantum computing, robotics, reality computing, drones, generative design, so-called “3D printing”—a year didn’t pass without a new wrapper for upcycled ideas as the world grappled with what the exponential growth of computing power would mean for everyone.
All these of course combined into something new and unexpected, and, ultimately, the death of the architect. Machines could not only compute—they slowly began to reason and decide, supported by breakthroughs in controlling quantum behaviors at scale. Their inputs grew from keyboards, mice and flatbed scanners to precisely geo-located multi-spectral 3D scans of the entire world, captured to support networks of “autonomous” vehicles. Their output devices grew from printers and plotters to massive programmable fabrication machines and facilities that could literally make anything, even themselves, then to matter itself at the molecular level as DNA-inspired material processes grew to maturity.
III
Ellen turned to the memory of her mother. There was nobody there. Keeping the physical remains of the deceased had become meaningless when there were so many traces of an existence—data collected over the century-and-a-half of an organic existence recorded in the very structure of matter itself. Physically meeting someone as part of knowing them had become unusual; being present with someone’s physical remains after they died had become pointless.
Ellen began to consider a sesquicentennial’s worth of data about her mother. The early years were sparse. Lives had not yet become fully instrumented in her mother’s childhood. But in her third decade the record began to grow richer.
The problem of keeping information had been solved by manipulating the structure of matter itself. Stuff and things had become records. The connection from there to stuff and things being shaped by data was a short leap. Data had become material.
Form being algorithmically determined gradually evolved into form being a physical record of information itself. The “internet of things” had become the internet of everything. Brick and mortar had become a data encoder. Ellen’s mother had started with algorithmically determined facades and plans in the classical tradition, but now the very material of the building was algorithmically determined at the material, even molecular level, and served to capture the stream of information flowing from the physical world during the “design phase”, including the experiences of the designer herself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had perhaps glimpsed this future hundreds of years earlier, declaring Architecture to be frozen music. Data and matter, information and form had become one and the same. The physical world was now an accumulating glacier of frozen knowledge.
In the 21st century theorists talked about “smart materials”, a catchall phrase conflating several still poorly understood ideas, but beginning to touch on how material would operate in the future. The materials Ellen worked with were just “materials” to her, but if the 21st century was talking about smart materials, these would have been “really, really smart materials”, perhaps even “brilliant materials”.
This post-smart material began to gather as Ellen re-coded her mother’s history and purpose into structure, drawing also on the data of her mother’s three organic children as well as the experience of Ellen’s own sentience. Form began to emerge from the surface cleared for this purpose. A mausoleum, a cenotaph, a crypt, a tombstone or temple—it would not have been recognizable as any of these. Some areas yielded softly to the touch and felt warm, others were hard and cold. Surfaces reflected and refracted light in ways that would have been impossible only a century ago. Volumes and spaces acquired oddly legible yet ambiguous forms. Some areas felt sad, others joyful…or intelligent. Frustrated or contemplative. All the result of her mother’s information, filtered through Ellen, becoming physical form.
In a world where actually visiting somewhere, someone or something had become uncommon, many of these effects would seem wasted, yet this is how everything was made, and how information about a physical life manifested in form.
This structure was remarkable, though, even in this world. Ellen applied all of her exceptional powers to the physical celebration of her mother’s life and work. Even years after its completion theorists and philosophers of art felt compelled to visit, to be present and experience with their own senses all that Ellen had brought into form.
In what might have been recognized as a cornerstone in another era, the initials LN were just visible at certain angles of the light—a scrap from the long-forgotten memory address of an executable that had never stopped executing.