WILL THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION leave architecture behind? The new, networked technologies that are transforming the way we experience space and time seem resolutely intangible, a universe apart from bricks and mortar. Yet such technologies are increasingly embedded within our walls, even within the very ground on which we stand. From environmental sensors, adaptive thermostats, and cloud-connected security systems to massive computerized farms—a particularly stark example of which is depicted on this issue’s cover—these apparatuses are catalyzing a nearly invisible shift in architecture that is nevertheless far more profound and ubiquitous than the stylistic trends that have been the primary effects of digital technology on the discipline thus far. To explore the largely unheralded impact of so-called smart technology on our built environment, Artforum turned to REM KOOLHAAS, an architect who is celebrated equally for his buildings and his manifestos, and who is known above all for his relentless critical reflection on architecture’s evolving place in the world.

Mishka Henner, Wrangler Feedyard, Tulia, Texas, 2013, ink-jet print, 59 × 73 1/4". From the series “Feedlots,” 2012–13.
Mishka Henner, Wrangler Feedyard, Tulia, Texas, 2013, ink-jet print, 59 × 73 1/4". From the series “Feedlots,” 2012–13.

AFTER A DECADE AND A HALF, the twenty-first century is beginning to reveal some of its likely essences. Architecture has entered into a new engagement with digital culture and capital—which amounts to the most radical change within the discipline since the confluence of modernism and industrial production in the early twentieth century. Yet this shift has gone largely unnoticed, because it has not taken the form of a visible upheaval or wholesale transformation. To the contrary: It is a stealthy infiltration of architecture via its constituent elements.

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The implicit authoritarianism of the digital regime sits in strange tension with a world that is slowly waking up to the realization that the neoliberal universality announced after the upheavals of 1989 will not happen. Instead, political correctness is now a system shared by East and West: It is the official ideology for the twenty-first century. A perverse new human-rights charter (improved, limited, achievable, value-free) is about to unite all peoples, all regimes, and is, by definition, popular. As a substitute for the French Revolution’s libertéégalitéfraternité, a new universal trinity has been adopted: comfort, security, sustainability. This new trinity will impose an inescapable and irreversible diktat on every domain, and architecture will embrace it with masochistic enthusiasm. It is not hard to predict how radically this trinity will affect our discipline in a wave of faux conscience, sweeping away all anterior practices of architecture, and with them the evidence that generations of smart artists, architects, clients, rulers, and craftsmen had already understood the inherent intelligence of buildings and cities for millennia. There seems to be little possibility of merging the knowledge accumulated over centuries with the narrow range of practices considered “smart” today. Perhaps the fundamental opposition we now face is between architecture’s long-established power to articulate the collective and the digital’s apparent ability to merge with the self.

What is most insidious about the digital regime—and where it differs from earlier social and political paradigms that relied on labor—is how essentially automatic, and therefore effortless, it is, once programmed and wired. There is no limit to quantity, duration, multiplication, connecting, cross-referencing. . . . The digital is essentially beyond exhaustion—an endlessly upgrading and mutating integration of the city, its architecture, its constituent elements, and its bodies. If the digital is about to deliver us to a sensor culture, does that imply an endless reinforcement of routine—a system proud to deliver more of the same? These relations can only turn in on themselves: the world as an endless, tautological repetition of cause and effect.

Rem Koolhaas is a founding partner in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture.