Thoughts
Attention, Artificial Intelligence, and Architecture: Contemporary Social Issues and the Solutions in Our Built Environment
Posted by Carlos Arnaiz on May 8, 2026
As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, our attention is being drawn further from the physical world with each new technological breakthrough. The emergence of new applications like ChatGPT, simulating text, and visual “deep fakes,” question the authenticity of our likeness, accentuating the gap between individuals and their surroundings. While this technology has the potential to transform nearly every facet of our lives, we find ourselves at a precarious crossroad with respect to how we view, manage, and interact with our surroundings.
As an architect, I believe the answer lies in paying attention to our built environment. Our buildings manage and control our relationships to our environment. They move air, process water, hold waste, consume energy, and transform the soil in complex metabolic processes that enable us to persist. The very best of contemporary architecture represents our brightest ideals for regulating our fragile environment.
The simple act of paying mind to our built environment rather than our digital devices may appear obvious, yet the cultivation of individual attention remains, as Justin E. H. Smith writes, an act of resistance in our attention-extraction economy. To pay attention to architecture today means to take time to look at our buildings in their setting, to imagine how the rooms in our homes create a domicile, to measure the proportions, temperature, and humidity of a new space with our bodies and to think about how the structures we built make the people we have become.
Neuroscientists are finding that our brains think through space. The cells in our minds, such as the hippocampus, subiculum, and entorhinal cortex process information through cognitive mapping. Boundaries, directional flow, and locational points provide our minds a scaffolding-like understanding of space which in turn serve as cognitive structures to organize other mental facilities such as language and spatial relationships.
Architecture works in tandem with our brains. The concepts suggested by our built environment are not independent of our engagement with space. In fact, our built environment is only completed once occupied. Numerous recent books on the neuroscience of navigation such as Christopher Kemp’s “Dark and Magical Places” and Michael Bonds’, “From Here to There,” document medical breakthroughs utilizing MRI scans that demonstrate how our brains employ spatial approaches to the processing of complex interactions.
Paying attention to architecture is a cognitive act with heuristic benefits. Heuristic tools help the human mind extrapolate solutions from little information. Architecture’s history of creating space for us to live can teach us something about how our minds work by providing solutions to the spatial problems. Architecture is part of the our brains’ pattern language. Every built environment represents a set of spatial solutions on how to live in this world that our brains and those of others interpret and make use of.
The deep interest in attention comes at a time when our grasp on our own intelligence has been shaken by the inconceivable discoveries of AI. Digitization has rendered human thought both “less contextual and less conceptual,” according to Kissinger, Schmidt and Huttenlocher, while paradoxically, our AI tools lack the ability to contextualize and reflect. We receive information today without a deep understanding of how it has been processed. Our lives are now being driven by technologies that are automated on a cascade of networked data fields that we cannot see.
Every built environment is a project of world-building however small or mundane. The stories we conjure out of our built environment influence the way we build out our “real world”. When we pay attention to our built environment, we are addressing architecture’s cash value the way the pragmatist Philosopher William James would have instructed, asking what difference a building makes in the world.
So as our world marches and stumbles from one crisis to another, let’s lift our heads, pay attention to our built environment and, in so doing, keep our minds sharp, noticing structures that help us determine and comprehend our emerging sense of collectivity. After all, it is this self-reflection that makes us human.