ABSTRACT
Architectural environment is shaped by cognitive choice, cultural preferences, economical capabilities, ecological considerations and political priorities as much as by physics and technology. Technology opens and expands this field of soft criteria and architectural possibility; and it invites architecture to explore the field, and to turn possibility into actuality, to produce objects of form and meaning. Architecture therefore needs hybrid objects, quasi-objects, objects with robust programs that can produce urban quality, objects that merge ecology and economy in circular value systems. Architecture needs to embed the agents of change inside the object. Bateson suggests that the nature of understanding is that it works as a dialectical exchange between form and process. Given an architectural intelligence and a well-informed intuition, it seems reasonable to assume that urban quality not only can, but must be embedded in the object.
