Attention is all we need
What our brains can learn from our buildings?
“Attention is the thing we offer, that we owe most to the world we live in… I do find it the regulatory ideal. I mean attention as a bodily and political act, not just an intellectual discipline. That form of attentiveness but writ large and political.” – Katherine Rundell
- INTRO:
Philosophy is an activity of climbing a ladder, reaching the top and noticing the ladder has disappeared so that one wonders at the existence of the world. -Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Have our new computational tools brought us to a Promethean moment whereby everything must change?
Computing technology permeates every aspect of our lives. Digital-based data-collection devices managed by AI-based machines run almost all human creations, from large pervasive infrastructures such as utility grids to indiscernible systems such as body implants. Knowledge and information are defined in terms of data. Power is a function of automation and predictive processing machines seems to drive every major decision, whether in a corporate board room or on a congressional pulpit.
Recent histories detailing the string of innovations leading to our current AI revolution identify 2017 as the breakthrough year. In November of that year, a gang of Google researchers published an article entitled “Attention is All We Need,” They presented a novel form of computing called self-attention. Their paper argued for a language-based model of learning that processed entire sentences at once instead of reading text word by word. The number of possible connections encoded by this breakthrough caused a massive jump in comprehension.
The self-attention transformer, as it was called, could leapfrog a linear approach to language comprehension and arrive at a multivariable understanding of language. The transformer captured context and patterns better by generating text more accurately. With self–attention, the transformer computed all the words in a sentence at the same time. This simultaneous processing occasioned computers that were faster to train not only because of their efficiency and ability to scale but because they captured context in an entirely new way.
Self-attention rests on a holistic understand of relationships between words. The transformer expanded comprehension beyond sentence boundaries creating a model of attention that afforded greater understanding of how and when a word is being used. The computational breakthrough marked a new way of seeing context.
The democratization of knowledge sparked by the internet and powerful microprocessors turned a new corner with the software understanding occasioned by self-attention. Computers were in effect given a new way to see.
Self-attention represents a new stage of seeing, understanding, and processing information in the information age. The effects have been enormous. Fields adjacent and even unrelated to technology, such as medicine, energy and finance are applying this processing framework with remarkable developments at frightening speeds.
The real sway of AI and its generative intelligence-based understanding of the world lies beyond language. The transformer models can recognize and predict any repeating motifs or patterns. From pixels in an image, using tools such as Dall-E, Mid-journey, and Stable Diffusion, to computer code using generators like GitHub Copilot. Software applications fashioned on self-attention transformation are predicting notes in music and designing drugs with novel proteins strands. Self-attention, suggests that in seeing context differently we can speculate on the present-future with greater accuracy.
The promethean fire emanating form these technological breakthroughs burns bright and fierce. There is no cure to progress for their dangers, as Benjamin Labbatut has written, are intrinsic. The ambivalence of application rests on human engagement.
The debates surrounding AI and generative intelligence have centered on the reasonable challenge of control and regulation. A few observers have questioned the definition of human intelligence. Does the third industrial revolution beckon a new way of reinterpreting the human mind? Could the emergence of a potential sentient machine be the moment to rethink how we understand our brains and conceive of our ability to perceive our surroundings?
Neuroscientists are finding that our brains think through space. We remember and regulate information by creating cognitive maps. Our built environment is not only a container for our bodies but an active participant in how our brains function. As such, our brains are deeply connected to our built environment.
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 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.
The cognitive maps we carry, construct and employ are not simply mental. Embodied cognition, the fact that our brain is inseparable from the body as a machine of knowledge, has been studied comprehensive in the last few decades by neuroscientist documenting how cognition is taking place within the body.
The experience of being lost coincides with moments at which our minds are busiest constructing the tools to help us find our way. Navigation, as the molecular biologist Christopher kemp has wonderfully documented in his book, Dark and Magical Places, is “one of the most complex cognitive tasks that we perform, and we’re doing it constantly- a thousand times a day”.
Architecture is, therefore, both a data-base and a form of knowledge. Our brain’s storehouse of experiences relating to architecture could be more than just data points regarding place, scale, light and orientation but produce an understating about how our environment is structured. Our brains treat spaces like a pattern language. A modular framework underpins our world AI and the self-attention model of seeing context represents an opportunity to re-assess our cognitive frameworks.
Like AI, architecture is built on modularity of all kinds, harnessing the power of both standardization and customization to generate anything with repeating patterns. Architecture, from the 3,000-year-old pyramids in Giza, is dependent on repeatable systems that can be organized to create space from the sandstone blocks quarried miles away down the Nile to the solar tiles tessellating a Dubai skyscraper.
Architectural form is modular. The scale of our modular construction systems determine our how we shape our surroundings. The manner in which we choose to aggregate these modular systems into a built environment define we design our world.
Architectural knowledge involves both a know-why and a know-how. Architectural design is a bridge between concept and detail. Concepts in architecture are drawn from the question of how to do live. Architecture suggests a way of life happens in direct response to the conundrum of what we make of community, communication, and the environment.
. Architects are notoriously fond of manifestoes. We build to address needs. Yet every building acts as both a portal and a mirror, locating reality in an increasingly surreal and utopian world. Architecture is therefore not only a technology to interface with our world but also one with ourselves. Our built environment is our best data-base on co-existence The concepts offered by architecture have to do with how we aim to manage our surroundings and our communities.
Our built environment is a representational device as much as a functional one. Buildings, landscapes, and cities do not represent a way of experiencing our world. Architecture is a model of life with accompanying effects. It embodies a particular awareness about the boundaries that make space possible. The space in question is that which enables life to be interpreted. In other words, we are not speaking of the actual shape of space but of the experiences of spaces strung together in an environment in our world that we then employ as a model.
Architecture is our oldest and most successful technological form because of its ability to be a backdrop, container, and infrastructure for living. It enables human civilization because of its power to evoke emotion; elicit ambience and serve as a setting for the re-imagination of ourselves. It is therefore not unseen and felt. We don’t need to understand architecture as a construction system or an economic paradigm for it to be palpable as the stage for our lives.
Architecture is already and always a social practice. A social practice with a debt to other individuals, creditors, owners, communities, clients, and cities. Architecture aesthetics is a method of negotiation: being in between, looking for connections between disparate parties and mediating conflict is the art of architectural representation. Ornament is criminal because its promiscuous in its associations with other fields of representation: botany, anatomy, and the plastic arts. Architecture has managed to transform the means of construction into a customary procedure for the creation of culture.
The role of seeing and interpreting our built environment is political. In interpreting the difference between lightness and mass or the relation between symmetry and the whole object, we disentangle the knots of a particular context. We have developed an instinctive ability to map context, track divergent behaviors as they relate to our bodies and then share this information with our peers. Paying attention to our built environment is a cognitive act that defines what it is to be human.
The brain has, in the last two decades, has been one of the most exciting topics of scientific research. A quick bibliographical search pulls dozens of popular titles published this millennium with titles like The Secret Life Of The Mind, Brain Rules And A Thousand Brains: A New Theory Of Intellgince. The tools have expanded, the funding has increased, the research subspecialties has spread resulting in an wealth of new discoveries. As an architect, the main takeaway, is just as The Nobel prize winning neuroscientist John O’Keefe write at the start of his famous manifesto The Hippocampus As Cognitive Map: “space plays a role in all our behaviors”
Neuroscientists are discovering that our brains create map-like structures to build models that in turn help us know the world. our built environment is a collection of many of these very space-informed structures. In fact, it is not surprisingly or even coincidental that our buildings are designed in much the same way. In other words, we build mental models of our world before we then construct what becomes the world that in turn shapes our surroundings, our perceptions, our communities, and ourselves.
What do these scientific discoveries mean for how we see architecture? The novelty and radicality of these findings suggest that our built environment is more than just a functional machine that enables civilization. It is even more than a cultural signifier. It is an artifact of our collective brain power that represents how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.
The neuroscientist Gyorgi Buzsaki from NYU’s Langone Health institute has been studying the hippocampus for the 4 decades and assets that these cluster of brain cells are not only involved in navigation,” He describes the complex spatial navigation mental travel for they enable the mind “to go to the future” to imagine and plan an array of possible outcomes. The place cells in the brain can perform this mental travel twenty times faster than it is possible in real space.
Robert Clark, a neuroscientist at the university of California, San Diego, has investigated what the human mind does with its cognitive maps highlighted the “difficulty of disentangling navigation from memory.” As Christopher Kemp, the molecular biologist from Michigan State university, writes: “space and time are the scaffolding on which memories are built environment.
The neurobiologist André Fenton has gone as far as suggesting that these traits of forward imaginative projection are what tie place cells in the mind with the accumulation of knowledge. He calls them knowledge representers, as a nod to how they use the construction of complex maps based on the abstraction of space to understand social hierarchies and store knowledge.
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 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. . “Understanding how we see, therefore, is to understand ourselves,” as the AI scientist Fei-Fei Li wrote in her book, “The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI.”
Heuristics is our best technique of self-discovery. Heuristic tools help the human mind extrapolate solutions from little information. Architecture’s a heuristic effect rests in the ability for space to connecting cognition with action. Brains are not fixed cellular organizations but a plastic organ that like a muscle is altered by what we ask it to do. Neuroscience has been testing and revealing the ways our brain change based on the activities we ask it to perform. Journals and studies in the last 20 years using animal modeling, virtual reality and MRI scanning has shown that humans can develop more sophisticated spatial cognitive abilities by activity using our brins to navigate space.
Moving through a building with attention can be a means for our minds to understand how we acquire cognitive map-like knowledge of our world. architecture can be an answer to the age all question of where we are. Our built environment offers a means to interpret what of our where is changing.
Being attentive to architecture involves placing ourselves in our spaces so that our lives become entangled with the spaces we inhabit. We become aware of how our movements and thoughts might be affected by the scale, orientation, and atmosphere of a 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.
The spatial context presented by architecture offers our brains a chance to learn how we decipher space. Design is a form of programming that demands an interest in unfamiliar territories. Designers imagine the space of others, our users, as a place filled with possibility. The foreign becoming something cherished, interesting and even intimate. The outcome of architectural design is the invention of new place to explore. Architecture offers our bodies as chance to exercise its faculties of spatial discovery. How does our brain make sense of a building, a city and the places in between?
When we pay attention to our built environment, we are addressing architecture’s cash value the way William James would have instructed, asking what difference a building makes in the world. An experience of another person’s thought. An encounter with the cognitive structure of another group.
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.
Cognitive scientist, John Bargh and James Gibson, have argued that perception and action are deeply intertwined. Anthropologists, like Dr. Katherine Loflin, have studied how our bonds to a specific location help individuals and communities thrive through, a three-year Knight Foundation study of 26 communities across America known as the Soul of the Community project.
We have all participated in the making of this environment. We have learnt how to take raw materials, mold them into usable shapes, organize them into parts and then assemble them into some meaningful whole. The translation from drawing, as a set of instructions to a team of builders, to building, as a cultural artifact is intrinsic to the way in which architecture transforms the world.
Our world has been remade by the mining, excavation, material transformation. Transformation and destruction are intrinsic to architectural production. Our built environment represents the potential for a feedback loop: for the histories surrounding a work of architecture to affect individuals in a direct emotive way, touching people, impressing identities through a connection with our built environment that is not purely transactional, not driven by a functionally driven thereby allowing for an opening in how we might relate with our physical surrounding, presenting the prospect for our world to remake us
Material innovations abound, allowing for structures to be lighter, larger, and more ephemeral than ever. Building codes result in architecture projects made from radically thin surfaces layered into 3-dimensional crepes. Architecture is a tool and an attendant accessory to the wild, raw, and ugly urges of human greed.
The architecture profession dawdles in the dens of power, yet it is helpless against the forces into which it is thrown. Opaque Financial instruments, hard nose construction contracts, interlocking technical specs, overlapping municipal codes. The complexity seems endless. Architecture coordinates multiple systems to afford the chance of singularity. Our built environment is a result of coaching teams, convincing neighbors, coercing financial complexity, characterized by greater levels of abstraction into a model of cognitive mapping.
If the 19 century was about styles and the 20th century one impelled by industrially charged manifestos then 21st-century might be about extreme mediated experiences. The focus on a mediated life aligns with a heightened sensibility towards how we interact with of our environment or that outside of ourselves. What is the environment? Is it a backdrop for the mediation?
Mathematics in both the ancient and renaissance tradition was a science requiring performance. Three quarters of all pre-modern math books have annotations by amateurs in the margins. Euclid meant for mathematical diagrams to be embodied. Looking and seeing remain open-ended. Heightened attention so we sense ourselves in the act of perception.
Military and math emerged as sister disciplines in the 14th century. Galileo taught us how Perspectival optics was used to measure a surface. Soldiers in the late renaissance had to be mathematically competent. World War 2 introduced statistics as data science. Prediction became the new science of warfare. The behaviorist revolution unleashed the ghosts of multiple agents onto the modern architectural field.
The experience of space is equivalently transformative. We encounter borders, passages, openings, categories, hierarchies of order and in so doing integrate these into our cognitive framework. Our brains make architecture into models of the universe and vice versa.
Space was no longer a void. The paradigm set forth by Bramante in his wondrous drawings for Saint Peter’s wherein form shaped a beautiful void of nothingness transforming the space of architecture today a field of subjects, nodes and vectors. The concepts suggested by our built environment are not independent of our engagement with space. In fact, our built environment is completed once occupied. Like Christopher Nolan’s definition of film making, a movie is only finished once the audience views and reacts to it.
Scale is the mediator of body and site. Architecture is a technology of both orientation and connection. It’s a tool for both inclusion and segregation—as such it one of the ways by which community is made. Connection to the material and ultimately geometric side of things. We work for more reasons that to capture energy and build structures for more reasons than to provide shelter.
Architecture as an active field welcomes both the body and the brain. Our identity as agents becomes indistinguishable from our technologies. The shaping of our environment via technology correspondingly defines our communities today. If we can build, we can think. Architecture is more than just a solution to a building problem. It is a map of our ideas about world, a trace of cartographic journeyers into new geographies.
Architecture is a spatial practice trapped in a temporal paradox. Buildings involve a grammar of past project the imagination of plans. Architecture is a practice about ideas about the future. The best buildings are the ones that create new ideas about how to live in this world. The ideas embedded in architecture are specific to how we organize the world into categories of matter.
What then is our built environment at the opening decades of the 21st century? We accommodate all things: from the poly valent, the nonhierarchical, the multi-centered, the non-symmetrical. Our critical discourse is an amalgam of the classic with the modern. Vitruvius three principles for a well-designed building remain relevant: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas.
What is architecture at a time of intangible capital and economic volatility? What is architectural aesthetics during the third industrial revolution, one defined by computing instead of steam or electricity? How do we fit into this new place we are creating and which in turn changes us?
The pandemic exposed the fragility of interdependencies and the need for a model to manage isolation. We have been living in a state of permacrisis. Fragmentation abounds and volatility rules. architecture has been radically changed by technology and the arrival of Anthropocene.
Architectural space today is different because of ecological crisis and digital revolution. Both phenomena have changed the meaning of space. The first made it active as a participant. The second has made it flat, omni-present, intimate, and painful.
If we are participants in the making of our built environment today, what do we have to say about it? How do our contemporary fears, obsessions, desires, and anxieties inform our built environment? The best of our contemporary architects as themselves these questions every day. Their work contains ideas reflecting our time. Our buildings are cognitive structures that reveal our attitudes about self, community, and environment.
Our planet is precariously fragile, close to broken. The World Bank’s annual report from 2023 was titled our future is burning. We are aware that our participation in this place has broken it. That realization is at the center of our understanding of beauty in our building permit.
Today’s architectural forms, from Gehry’s Bilbao to SANAA’s Grace Farms, represent a massive range of spatial effects. These effects are modulated by our body and by the interaction of other bodies. We touch feel and remember, our planet and other people through architecture. Elements we perceive as being divergent or oppositional exist simultaneously. For Kant the question of the human was one of identity, today one of localization. Where is mankind after the third industrial revolution? A topological turn, from enlightenment to entanglement.
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”. Architectural production is an exercise in creating our own version of reality and in so doing make sense of life in the outside world. As our communities change and our desires for being together Architecture can help us determine and comprehend what is our emerging sense of collectivity.
Allegory as a way of making a story personal, local communal. What architecture does to typology when it transforms it for a different locale at a different time. Type is universal but not unrestricted. It’s content requires adaptation. Allegory offers an alternative version of functionalism. Allegory as the possibility of another world inextricably connected to the articulation of reality, stability and posterity. The making of place that unites body and mind for as Paul Virilio wrote, the “Body cannot abstract itself from space” The Japanese word for downtown, Shtimachi, refers to more than a locality in Tokyo but as the Arata Isosaki write is a “region that is both physical and imagined with very blurry boundaries. “
So much of filmmaking these days involves world-building, whether it’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe or “Avatar.” Each time Yeoh and company “verse-jump,” Academy members see a version of what they do: beam moviegoers into another dimension. The multiverse isn’t just a philosophical concept—it’s a mode of storytelling that represents the movies’ strongest contemporary hold over cultural imaginary.
The cultural goal of architecture is the creation of spaces for the imaginary, an aesthetic about our environmental situation. We are cultural creatures. We are always finding ways of talking about the expressive potential of our built environments. We take variation in our environment and incorporate it into our aesthetic preferences. Architecture has almost always dealt with materials pared down, exposed to the problem of humanity civilizing force, a force that extracts nature from its context. A paradoxical fluidity results between architecture and its context. The work of building an environment begets context. Our occupation of these spaces activates space generating a new context.
Architecture offers a way of experiencing awe. What is awe? Awe “is its own thing,” believes Dr. Keltner. It is “the absence of self-preoccupation.” We perceived vastness” and in so doing, researchers have found that we experience tremendous health benefits that include calming down our nervous system and triggering the release of oxytocin, the “love” hormone that promotes trust and bonding.
Our bodies respond differently when we are experiencing awe than when we are feeling joy, contentment, or fear. We make a different sound, show a different facial expression. Dr. Keltner found that awe activates the vagal nerves, clusters of neurons in the spinal cord that regulate various bodily functions, and slows our heart rate, relieves digestion and deepens breathing.
Let us actively participate in the occupation of space by becoming literate in how our buildings are, drawn, made and eventually demolished. Recognize how our buildings partake in process. Turn away from a simple functionalism or an optimized utopia and towards and aesthetic of the
We can learn not to objectify our buildings as either duck or shed but think of our built environment as a series of actions that are both transforming their surroundings and ourselves. The qualities of these spaces are made manifest by our occupation. The essence of the container is therefore, not the cask but the liquid in the cask, as Heidegger was fond of saying.
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.
The Internet’s greatest strengths are its nonhierarchical architecture leading to the scalability muscle offering no separation between the subject and object. “The joy and wonder of the internet”, as James Ball has noted “is that everything is connected.” Utility shifts in a digital world characterized by the spaciousness and blindness of social mediation. Instead of a physical power to transform materials and assemble new forms, utility turns towards the desire to see through a medium. The new paradigm prioritizes optics over systems.
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.
