In February, two artists, Nora al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles – claimed to have scanned the bust of Nefertiti in a German history museum using a handheld Kinect Sensor. They then posted the digital files online.

Their goal, they said, was to free the statue from its imprisonment inside the walls of Berlin’s Neues Museum by enabling anyone with access to a 3D printer to make their own near-perfect replicaÌę– a Nefertiti for all.

Al-Badri and Nelles saw their caper as an act of cultural liberation. It was a gesture against what they believe to be a legacy of colonial theft and appropriation, in which the goods of one nation or culture – in this case, Egypt – ended up in the museums and storerooms of another.

But the stunt illustrated another possibility: the indirect heist. Instead of stealing the thing itself, you can just pilfer the set of parameters – the metadata – that define it.

Why steal the actual bust of Nefertiti when you can instead easily nab the measurements to fabricate a new one? You would not have the original but you would have the peculiar wealth that comes with possessing a potentially infinite number of exact copies.

Al-Badri and Nelles were not the first to release scans of unique artwork into the world. For some time Cosmo Wenman has been housed in the British Museum – such as , one of the Parthenon sculptures. Like Al-Badri and Nelles, Wenman sees what he does as setting free the world’s art. He also online.

Digital larceny

Of course, metadata has always been a target. The world of industrial espionage is filled with such tales. Stealing the plans for a nuclear reactor, a classified weapon, or a new computer chip have long been lucrative pursuits. What is intriguing about this new phase in the history of digital larceny is that meta-thievery is easier than ever.

For example, it turns out that just . Accurate audio recordings made during the 3D-printing process can be used to reverse-engineer the objects being printed, allowing 3D-printed objects to be reproduced elsewhere based on the stolen acoustic metadata.

In this scenario, all that’s needed for a sophisticated theft of intellectual property is a smartphone left near a 3D-printer to record the sound it makes. The acoustic signature carries enough information about the precise movements of the printer’s nozzle. The recording can then be used to reverse engineer the object being printed and recreate it elsewhere. Steal the metadata, and you steal the object.

White noise

The researcher behind this discovery, Mohammad Al Faruque, director of the advanced integrated cyber-physical systems lab at UC Irvine later suggested that one way to counteract this kind of IP theft would be to introduce random noise into the printing facility. Any objects reverse-engineered from the resulting, imprecise sound data would be inaccurate. Acting as a kind of acoustic watermark, this would help to mask the sound of the printer, rendering any audio recordings useless.

Hidden within Al Faruque’s observation is a key to how to guard against such heists in the first place. Preventing accurate audio recordings, or thwarting the production of laser scans, will require rethinking the basic tenets of physical security. Rather than only preclude direct human contact with a valuable object, for example, museums and factories might also invest in new forms of defence, such as acoustic cloaking, thermal camouflage, and even reflective surfaces used for their disruptive effects against laser scanning equipment.

The security systems of the future will be aimed at scrambling an object’s metadata, deliberately introducing glitches, missteps, and errors into any attempted reproduction. If you can dazzle the devices that are being used to record or scan a given object, then you can effectively protect that object from illicit duplication.

Of course, as the work of Wenman, Al-Badri and ÌęNelles so provocatively suggests, there is good reason to pause before sealing our cultural artefacts behind otherwise invisible walls of white noise or laser-jamming effects. But for those of us with new products to hide or valuable factories to run, the challenge of true security just got a lot stranger.

In a 1963 short story called The Walls science fiction author Keith Laumer writes of a young husband whose enthusiasm for consumer electronics brings emotional ruin to his wife, Flora. Flora is forced to bear the brunt of her husband Harry’s need for ever-more intense audio-visual stimulation, which radically transforms their cramped urban home.

By installing an all-encompassing cube of Full-wall flat-screen television panels, one on every side of their living room, Harry seeks a level of media saturation so complete that it’s as if the original room is no longer there. Flora, however, finds the transformation vertiginous. The apartment suddenly seems both dizzyingly infinite and horribly constricting, annihilating her sense of where the Full-wall ends and reality begins.

With the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive released last month – and Microsoft’s HoloLens on its way – consumer virtual reality has arrived. And the excitement around the technology brought Laumer’s story to mind. As Harry and Flora found, VR could have a big impact on our home life. Ultimately, it may force us to rethink completely what we want from our homes.

Incorporating virtual objects, people and places into our homes will require actual space: space for visual projection and physical interaction that allow virtual worlds to come to life. With applications that blend the real and virtual – as with the HoloLens – you need empty space for the virtual to appear within.ÌęYou also need adequate space to flail around: reports are already coming in of people injuring their hands playing VR game Selfie Tennis , for example

“Let’s assume that you don’t have a giant empty room in your house just waiting to become your own personal holodeck,” Wes Fenlon recently wrote for PC Gamer magazine. “Because if you do, you’re already in good shape for VR. Also, we’re very jealous and would like to come hang out, please.” Virtual reality could push interior design even further towards minimalism – a blank canvas on which to paint the worlds that aren’t really there.

In fact, those most prepped for VR may be those of us who already embrace the kind of lifestyle advocated by Marie Kondo, who champions what she calls “the life-changing magic of tidying up”. Kondo prescribes a drastic pruning of possessions to free up space and end the supposed distraction imposed by clutter. Kondo is aiming for a kind of spiritual cleansing, but welcoming virtual reality into our homes will require a similar effort.

As Fenlon has fun pointing out, the virtual reality boom is a perfect excuse for decluttering – getting rid of furniture, removing rugs and cables you might trip on, and even taking pictures down from your walls so you don’t knock them off. Most VR experiences also require you to stand. So Fenlon also recommends purchasing a standing desk in your office and anti-fatigue mats, instead of carpeting, to help ease the hours you will be spending on your feet.

It’s partly tongue-in-cheek, of course. But Oculus is not joking in the guidelines accompanying its Rift headset when it warns users to “remember that the objects you see in the virtual environment do not exist in the real environment, so don’t sit or stand on them or use them for support.”

And a goes to show that many of us are going to need reminding.

Oculus would not have to warn us if the temptation to interact with the virtual didn’t exist. But we are all too easily tricked into confusing what is and isn’t real. As we declutter, it is worth remembering Flora’s fate in The Walls. She begins to find the world of screens impossible to escape and can no longer tell whether what she sees is taking place in a neighbour’s apartment or on TV.

That’s not to take away from the fact that virtual reality tech is a marvel. But maybe we should pause before throwing everything out. If the power cuts out, we’ll all be left wondering where the furniture went.

New Urbanist is Geoff Manaugh‘s monthly column that explores how technology and design are changing our cities, homes, the built environment – and ourselves

Glue is the future of architecture. At least that’s how architect Greg Lynn sees it. And he’s not alone. “Mechanical assembly is already waning in many industries,” Lynn says. “An airplane now is glued together. A car now is glued together. Even a lot of appliances are being glued together.” So why not skyscrapers?

We have the materials. These non-metallic composites – such as carbon fibre, fiberglass panels and other structural plastics – are lightweight, often much cheaper than traditional industrial materials and offer physically stronger systems for designers to work with.

In fact, composite materials are more like rigid fabrics. Sticking them together results in building-sized components that can sometimes be set hard in just a few seconds, depending on the adhesives used. Composite materials are already used to make high-performance yachts, wind turbine blades, large passenger aircraft such as Boeing’s carbon fibre Dreamliner and even commercial spacecraft such as SpaceShipOne.

“These are fundamentally different material systems,” says architect , who began his career making composite sailboats, but later moved on to designing structures such as family homes and art museums. His firm recently worked on the modular exterior panels for the expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’, which is currently the largest composite-based building facade in the United States.

Trust issues

The connective strength of architectural adhesives can be astonishing, says Kreysler, surpassing that of mechanical connections such as bolts and screws. But composites are not well understood in the building industry – the invisible magic of glue is distrusted in favour of brute force. As a result, they have not yet been widely adopted.

Even when assembling a structure using carbon fibre panels, contractors will often still use screws, rivets or bolts. This is both redundant and expensive. Glue would be much stronger than a bolt, especially when standing up to sheer forces.

Despite being niche for the time being, there are already successful building projects that use these techniques. Take the project from the University of Maine, which is exploring the construction of lightweight bridges. Made from carbon fibre tubes, with individual arches weighing so little they can be carried by four people, these road bridges can be assembled in less than two weeks. In the US, 18 have already been built.

Lynn thinks it is just a matter of time before we see skyscrapers held together entirely by adhesives.

‘The use of composites and adhesives could revolutionise engineering in every building type, says Lynn. It could change the way we design around natural disasters, for example. By drastically cutting the weight of a building, you could stop it swaying so much during an earthquake.

Weighty matters

Lighter buildings are also cheaper. “If you can take 30 per cent of the weight out of the upper section of a building by using lightweight composite materials, you could end up saving between 70 and 80 per cent of the material in the entire structure,” says Lynn.

And these aren’t the only advantages. Most skyscrapers are built around a steel frame, which expands in the heat much more quickly than other materials, such as masonry cladding. But composite buildings are monocoque structures, like the hulls of sailing boats. Such buildings fare much better as they expand and contract. “The skin is the structure,” says Kreysler.

What’s more, composite structures are typically made from fewer parts, so assembly is simpler. But this also makes those structures stronger – sticking a smaller number of parts together along large surface areas beats bolting or nailing them together at specific, vulnerable points.

Of course, there are down sides. Most adhesives deteriorate rapidly in a fire and can even feed a blaze. Recently, composites have been blamed for a hotel fire in Dubai – materials used on the building’s exterior are thought to have fuelled the flames.

Oiling the cogs

Kreysler and Lynn think we need to get composite and adhesive-based construction methods better incorporated into building regulations. But this will involve testing, which takes time and money. Few architects or clients today have much of an incentive to pay for the extra steps that mean the one-off use of a novel material becoming a permanent part of a city’s building code. The new Apple headquarters, designed by the London-based architecture firm Foster and Partners, has a lot of exposed carbon fibre. “But that’s a billion-dollar building,” says Lynn.

However, maybe the impetus will come from elsewhere. It is worth bearing in mind that most composites are actually petroleum products, says Lynn. They potentially offer a massive untapped market for the oil industry to exploit.

, a manufacturer of composite components based in Dubai, has been involved in the construction of movable, lightweight domes made from carbon fibre that provide shade in mosques, as well as a composite-based rail station in Medina. Similar to a heavily forested region promoting timber, the oil-producing nations of the world could see this natural resource used not as a fuel to be burned but as a raw material to be converted into futuristic building components.

If anyone is prepared to invest in turning petroleum products into a new form of architecture, Dubai is a good place to start.

The politics of simulation

Playing with lives

. It’s a neat summary of a utopian paradigm, a form of grass-roots, do-it-yourself urban maintenance. Smartphones at the ready, city dwellers can report potholes, leaking water mains or broken streetlights simply by taking a photograph and uploading it. Hundreds of local authorities, especially in the US, support the idea – many are using dedicated apps to make it as easy as possible. See a problem, click a button and, once the machinery of municipal intervention clicks into gear, it’s fixed.

However, in most cases a lack of work crews, insufficient public funds, sclerotic bureaucracy and long waiting lists for jobs mean that it works better in principle than practice. But the era of see, click, fix might soon be one-upped.

at the University of Leeds, UK, envisions a city where everyday maintenance issues will not only be reported by mobile robotic sensors roaming the metropolis, but one where the repairs themselves will be carried out by robots. In what Purnell and colleagues call “self-repairing cities”, a robot could get to work on a problem as soon as it is reported.

, a colleague of Purnell’s also at the University of Leeds, shares the enthusiasm. He thinks on-site robots carrying out precision repairs will avoid the need for disruptive construction jobs in the heart of our cities.

Large construction vehicles would be gone, along with scaffolding-clad facades or the blinding lights of late-night repair jobs. Purnell’s robots would be physically rooted within the very infrastructures they fix. Self-healing street lights or road surfaces are just the beginning of what could eventually be rolled out across a city. For every utility, a mechanical guardian: robots tending buried water mains; robots watching over electricity cables; even robots trawling sewers for blockages and fatbergs.

These self-guided machines would be the white blood cells of the urban environment: a city-scale immune system made entirely from remote-controlled or fully autonomous robotic repair teams.

Perch and repair

The team anticipates different types of robot with specific roles. Some would perch like birds on structures such as street lights, waiting to swoop down and patch them up. Others would be released and forgotten about, disappearing into our urban infrastructure like insects or worms. They will operate indefinitely, performing inspection, repair, metering and reporting tasks from places like utility pipes. And some would be sent out on dedicated diagnostic missions, assessing the damage to a particular road surface, for example.

We could easily add other types of robot – such as the cable-weaving drones developed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Flying robots could be used to secure dangling objects, knocked loose by earthquakes or storms, essentially stitching them back on to the structures from which they have become detached. Or they could even knit together temporary, small-scale emergency suspension bridges for people stranded by floods.

It will be some time before we share our cities with such devices, however – not least because of cybersecurity concerns. Purnell and colleagues are keen to avoid a scenario where maliciously hacked “perch and repair” robots swoop down on the heads of an unsuspecting populace like a robot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Still, faced with accelerating urbanisation and a growing risk of floods, wildfires, droughts, superstorms and rising sea levels, the goal of creating so-called resilient infrastructure is at the top of many designers’ wish lists.

Indestructible infrastructure

As well as maintenance bots, this resilience will come in many forms, including the way cities are laid out and managed. But it could also be built into structures themselves. Self-healing concrete can use calcite-excreting bacteria to patch its own cracks caused by weathering or earthquakes, for example.

Other materials with self-healing properties are being developed by the military and the aeronautics industry. There are polymers that could repair hairline cracks in aircraft wings or seal up bullet holes in body armour and fuel tanks. NASA is looking at self-repairing materials to safeguard everything from space suits to spacecraft. All of these have obvious implications for architectural construction.

Cities made from such materials could begin to stitch themselves back together after natural disasters. There may be scars, but damaged structures could shore themselves up enough to welcome back their inhabitants – at least temporarily.

The ultimate promise is a metropolis that we could leave to take care of itself. The urban world could thus be treated like an ecosystem, one tended by vigilant robots and constructed from hand-me-down self-healing materials from the likes of NASA. In such cities our role would then be comparable to that of a high-tech gardener, occasionally pruning back or replacing systems that would otherwise thrive on their own.

Image credits (from top): Monika Kanokova/EyeEm/getty; Robert Stainforth/Alamy Stock Photo; Architecture and Digital Fabrication Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control ETH Zurich; Morgan Hill/Alamy Stock Photo

It seems hard to lose track of an entire city. But that appears to be what’s taken place – and not just once, but over and over again. The infamous “ghost cities” of China have become a favourite internet meme of the past half-decade. These ghost cities are meant to be sprawling wastelands of empty streets and uninhabited megastructures, without a human being in sight. But for all the discussion, do these places really exist?

A Chinese ghost city should be easy to find. After all, it is not just a failed development, limited to one or two buildings in a quiet neighbourhood of an existing metropolis. It is an entire human settlement, built with government support, for a population of millions who – for whatever reason – have yet to arrive.

Rumour has it that China is full of these empty shells. But where they actually are poses a more complex question than might be expected. And the hunt for China’s ghost cities reveals things about urban development the world over.

Blind spots

Last month,researchers funded by Chinese search giant Baidu strode into the field. Their approach was surprisingly simple. By tracking the location data of Baidu’s hundreds of millions of daily users, they could identify the places with the heaviest internet traffic. This also revealed locations with no – or very little – online activity. Were these the ghost cities?

The researchers screened their results for seasonal variation. They omitted tourist towns that experience a population boom half of the year and fall silent for the rest, for example. In the blind spots of user data that remained were more than 50 vast empty regions in China that were also recent sites of significant development.

Previous investigations of habitation levels have been done by counting the number of homes with lights on at night, for example. Using internet data from hundreds of millions of people gives a more accurate picture. The same technique might even be used to survey the US rust belt. But none of these approaches address the question of why ghost cities exist in the first place.

This has not been the only attempt this year to seek out China’s ghost cities. A company called in Palo Alto, California, made headlines a few months earlier for using high-resolution satellite imagery to do real-time economic forecasting. They offer what is in effect private space-age espionage: the company analyses satellite imagery in great detail and sells what they find to global investors.

This includes measuring the shadows cast by Chinese construction sites to verify whether or not a building project is still under way or if it has stalled. Measuring shadows from one week to the next can indicate whether or not the Chinese housing market has become saturated, for example.

Close to home

Orbital Insight’s analyses also suggest that we should be looking at ghost cities nearer to home – frozen construction sites, uninhabited neighbourhoods, failed building units. Other firms, including Spaceknow, Planet Labs and BlackSky Global, are also using hundreds of thousands of satellite images, taken daily, to look for details that could be turned into useful data. Even the presence of vehicles in car parks has economic implications, indicating that a metropolitan area is healthy and functioning.

is an architectural photographer at Columbia College in Chicago. He has a different perspective on these questions. For the past year, Caemmerer has been documenting sites of underpopulated architectural development throughout China. He refers to these places as “unborn cities”. This is a deliberate flipping of the ghost cities metaphor: whereas “ghost city” implies a metropolis whose time has come and gone – an abandoned city – Caemmerer points out that these cities are yet to see life.

Caemmerer has visited the Kangbashi New Area in Inner Mongolia, the Meixi Lake area near Changsha, and Tianjin’s Yujiapu Financial District, all labelled as ghost cities. What he found are real estate developments simply waiting for people to arrive. The cities are deliberately built to the point of near completion before inhabitants move in, he says.

Different model

Calling them ghost cities reveals a misunderstanding, says Caemmerer. “It fails to recognise that they are built on an urban model, timeline, and scale that is simply unfamiliar to the methods of Western urbanisation.”

Nevertheless, Caemmerer’s photographs are eerie and astonishing. Ominous, unlit towers loom over empty business districts. Blank lakes reflect the orderly facades of uninhabited housing blocks in an orange glow of sunset. Concrete megastructures lurk in the polluted haze of construction sites as streetlights turn on in the distance, illuminating nothing. The effect is almost picturesque.

Caemmerer’s interest in China is as much about debunking the myth of ghost cities as it is about showing how ubiquitous such places are. “I’m interested in what happens to the urban landscape when those who it was built for are not present,” he says. This includes cities in the US, such as his hometown of Chicago, which also becomes “a ghost town from the right angle”.

For all the statistical analysis and computational firepower being unleashed by big data to find empty places on the far side of the world, we would do well to look a bit closer to home, at the unfinished landscapes of our own urban centres and the economic lessons we might draw from them.

Seeking out ghost cities is about looking ahead, says Caemmerer. These empty places are not built for the present. “I’m interested in what the architecture of these cities says about the future they’re expecting.”

Image credits: Kai M. Caemmerer/kaimichael.com

The looping path returns again and again, tracing precise geometric patterns. Some fall back on the shapes that preceded them, as if being woven together; others accrete to form new layers. Eventually, an object emerges – a tabletop vase, a piece of avant-garde furniture, sometimes an entire building.

are exploring the limits of 3D printing in architecture. Three years ago, the pair founded a San Francisco-based start-up called to devise not only new building components made possible by the technique, but also ways to use materials such as rubber, wood, paper and clay in architectural-scale 3D printing.

Their feedstock includes edible materials such as chocolate and salt, which can be used to construct both individual bricks and . Salt turns out to be surprisingly well suited to the intricate digital forms 3D printing allows. Fragile but beautiful, rooms fashioned from it (pictured below) are translucent, seeming to glow from within when sunlit.

This might sound like creating a sculpture and then dressing it up as a garden shed. But the team’s purpose is highly practical. Rael’s forays into the field began with a look at the use of earth in construction throughout history. In his 2009 book , he laboriously documented how earth has been a mainstay of building for millennia, from mud bricks to rammed-earth walls, from African mosques to Iranian mountain villages. That there is a direct line between mud-brick making and the strange ceramic objects emerging from Rael and San Fratello’s 3D printers is striking, yet entirely logical.

For Rael, building with earth has simply been updated. On his Instagram feed, he uses the hashtag to describe this mesmerising confluence of computer-based fabrication and good old, fingernail-crusting clay.

Clay and salt – as well as resin, nylon and sand – can now be squeezed out precisely in layers to form complex, interlocking geometric shapes. Whether you call them bricks, modules or components, it is earth architecture reborn, filtered through algorithms and high-tech machines.

The implications of this rebirth could literally be seismic. Much of the work produced by Emerging Objects would not look out of place in a Manhattan art gallery. But the unusual aesthetics belie the practical applications.

, for example (pictured above), is a material with a sponge-like interior capable of storing small amounts of atmospheric water in ceramic micro-pores. This allows evaporative cooling, which helps to maintain a comfortable internal temperature with no need for electricity.

A related project called uses deep folds and internal loops – all 3D printed from sand – to create a wall (pictured below). The wall thus keeps part of itself in the shade even in direct sunlight, helping keep residents cool, again without energy-intensive air conditioning.

Ìę

Then there’s , an earthquake-resistant structure built from interlocking 3D-printed sand blocks. Inspired by ancient Incan construction, the angular blocks are designed to shift and resettle after a seismic event, unlike the rigid cemented-together rectangular blocks of most modern buildings.

Such nested architectural components promise an easily scaled response to living in a seismic zone such as San Francisco, says Rael. Builders could simply incorporate irregularly shaped 3D-printed blocks into their constructions and the resulting buildings would resettle rather than break apart after the big one hits.

Emerging Objects wants to revolutionise building techniques the world over. As with plans to bring delivery drones to Africa, traditional village life in developing countries can sometimes be transplanted into the future at a stroke.

Rael imagines high-tech workshops humming away in remote regions. With basic computing power, local masons would be able to 3D print new building components in situ more easily than they can shape mud bricks by hand, leapfrogging modern cities in terms of construction techniques. Importantly, printing bricks rather than larger components allows them to be assembled into forms in keeping with a region’s existing architecture.

Indeed, one of Emerging Objects’ fundamental axioms is that the surge of interest in architectural-scale 3D printing has been waylaid by an unnecessary search for ever-larger printers. A building-sized printer might produce a building-sized object, but thinking in terms of individual components, not whole buildings, is the way to go, says Rael. Scale the product, not the printer.

This would be a win-win for everyone, he says. Smaller printers are more likely to fit into existing workshops and would need less energy to run. They also make it easier to add much-needed redundancy.

“If you only have one machine, and it crashes or breaks in the middle of a job, then the whole operation grinds to a halt.” Not so when you have a hundred printers all churning out bricks. And local workers are already proficient at assembling buildings using individual components.

At least, that’s the idea. Supplying earthquake zones and the developing world with architectural 3D printers is yet to happen, of course. So far, Emerging Objects’ work has found little purchase outside of their research lab and a few art galleries.

But Rael and colleagues offer a glimpse of a different future to most, where architecture is not based around prefab walls of glass and steel. Buildings could be handmade and bristling with ornamental detail, just built using individual pieces hot off a printer.

(Image credits: Emerging Objects)

This articleÌęis beingÌęmade freeÌęto view thanks to sponsorship fromÌęFord

The way a city hangs together – especially the ease of finding your way around it – often comes down to something very simple: the way its addresses work. The idea that adjacent structures will be numbered sequentially, or that streets will be named and numbered in a way that is easy to use and quick to memorise, seems essential – a prerequisite for a functioning urban landscape.

But there are other ways of moving through and organising the built environment. And the future of addresses might not be as clear as you think. As we open up our cities to driverless vehicles and delivery drones, a whole new system of naming and numbering is on the way.

In the 1950s, celebrated urbanist studied how people make mental maps of built-up locations. For Lynch, cities can be evaluated in terms of what he called their “legibility”. A legible city is one whose “districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all pattern”. And, more importantly, within this pattern a person – whether a long-term resident or a short-term visitor – would be able to find things.

As Lynch put it, legibility “enables one to move about easily and quickly: to find a friend’s house or a policeman or a button store”.

Or, in less theoretical terms, cities need addresses. A clear, logical address system is absolutely central to finding Lynch’s button store. Even the most tangled city can become legible when its addresses correspond in a reliable and predictable way to the locations you are trying to find.

Off the grid

But there are other layers to city navigation, in which culturally or personally significant locations may have no recognised address at all. Imagine instructing a friend to join you for lunch on a bench in London’s Hyde Park. The park itself is easy enough to find, of course, but strolling through its network of footpaths, flower beds and water features, a new challenge arises. How do you specify the location of the particular bench you’ve chosen to sit on? The bench has no address – in Lynch’s terms, the interior of the park is illegible.

So you might steer your friend to the “bench near the fountain”, or the bench where you met last month.

At this point, we have left the world of legible addresses and entered a sphere of vernacular description and off-the-cuff contextual information. But entire cities can operate at this level.

Consider Beirut. As journalist Jenny Gustafsson recently wrote: “Whether visiting a friend for the first time or trying to find someone’s office, – they may exist, but probably won’t be of much help anyway, because no one really uses them.”

Despite this, of course, Beirut is a thriving city: friends still visit friends and button shops do brisk business. In fact, informal urban navigation can offer a richer, more complexly layered experience of the city; these sorts of unaddressed places, located not by numbers and grids but by human conversations, can have an altogether different quality precisely by existing outside of a city’s official system.

Or look at Tokyo. There, finding an individual building amidst the sprawl can feel like a kind of “”. In Japanese cities, street names are rarely used in an address. Instead, locations are identified using a hierarchical system of numbers designating apartment, building, block and district, which are then nested within cities and prefectures.

Urban space explosion

These examples are important, because they suggest that legibility in an urban environment can take many forms. The contextual directions given in places like Beirut or the confusing boulevards of Abu Dhabi – where different streets with the same name can confound even locals – are often seen as anachronisms. They are considered anomalous relics of a chaotic phase of urban design that has since been streamlined by the clarity of the Western city grid.

However, these other systems of address are not necessarily something that cities should be trying to leave behind. Indeed, beyond their enduring cultural nuance and personal charm, these systems might also offer an unexpected look ahead – a sign of things to come as we open our streets, buildings and cities to self-driving cars and home-delivery drones.

In the machine-readable metropolis, a specific address – 15 Lombard Street, say – becomes less useful because it is not specific enough. For a drone tasked with delivering packages to a particular windowsill on the third floor, that number on the front door will be functionally irrelevant. The building may have multiple windowsills, several metres of undifferentiated pavement in front of it and plenty of accessible roof space – all of which could soon need their own specific identifiers.

Urban space is on the verge of an explosion in its address types and locations: precise GPS coordinates, RFID-triangulation beacons and even simple machine-readable numbers emblazoned on rooftops will mean that one building might soon contain dozens of addresses and locations. This will fundamentally change how we understand and navigate cities – and how we define their overall legibility.

In other words, that windowsill outside your office will transform from being something more like an afterthought of architectural ornamentation to being a formal participant in the new urban economy. That windowsill, not the building’s front door, will be the legal address you use for drone-delivery services.

As address systems expand to accommodate these new sorts of places, they will also be accompanied by new cobwebs of legal regulation. These laws might determine acceptable sizes or the use of specific building materials, for example, and there could well be annual safety inspections to ensure that these newly recognised locations have complied. The city, in this vision, becomes knotted with technical coordinates, a maze of machine-readable locations that fundamentally reorganise the city and give addresses to places previously seen as being too minor to matter.

Roomba rumba

Robot ransoms

Accessible homes

“Does your home have an airplane mode?” The RAM House prototype allows control over what radio signals enter, or leave, the structure (Image: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti for Space Caviar)

When a newly renovated apartment in San Francisco went on the market earlier this year for roughly $8.5 million, its asking price included a somewhat unexpected amenity: “excellent EMF protection”. The entire flat had been .

Architects used to be concerned primarily with questions of light, visual aesthetics and maintaining a comfortable temperature – with an ear for acoustic privacy. Today, however, in an age of mobile phone communications, Bluetooth and home WiFi – to name just a few of the sources of electromagnetic waves now coursing through the built environment – architects must consider a whole new range of forces and energies. Put another way, electromagnetism is beginning to have a physical influence on the way we construct and manage the built environment.

In the case of the San Francisco apartment – widely described by an incredulous media as – the home’s electromagnetic profile was achieved by applying heavy graphite-based paints on all interior surfaces. Conductive wire tape was then applied in a large network, connecting the walls, floors and ceilings. Finally, the windows were coated with transparent, EMF-resistant films. Taken as a whole, these measures prevent electromagnetic signals from entering the apartment. It is a live-in Faraday cage, an enclosure made from conductive materials, named after 19th-century inventor Michael Faraday who discovered how to block and redirect electrical fields.

Shimmering curtains of WiFi

Why? Among on the marketing website for the San Francisco property were lengthy descriptions of the potential health risks posed by electromagnetic fields. The house was being sold as a peculiar kind of isolation chamber, sealed off from the outside world. But what is particularly noteworthy here from an architectural perspective is the way in which interior design – including specific building materials – can be used to sculpt otherwise invisible electromagnetic environments.

Last year, physicist at Imperial College London published . The work relies on the Helmholtz equation, a partial differential equation for modelling field oscillations in space. Cole’s model revealed the ways in which curtains of WiFi shimmer and move through a building, passing from room to room, and around walls and other obstructions (pictured below). Cole has since made an .

Simulation of WiFi propagation in Cole’s own flat. The black circle represents the router, and the ‘hotter’ the colour the stronger the signal (Image: Jason Cole)

In one sense, Cole’s work simply reveals the obvious: that certain spatial configurations of routers and receivers offer better wireless reception than others. This is hardly surprising. However, his model suggests an alternative approach: rather than continuing to shuffle devices around within an existing space, why not rethink the positioning of the walls in the first place – or at least the materials those walls are made from?

The model has intriguing architectural implications. Since these equations show how WiFi signals are reflected or blocked by materials such as brick, concrete, timber and glass, then it’s conceivable that an architect could simply reverse-engineer the ideal WiFi space from these same calculations, says Cole.

Signal architecture

In other words, architects could use computational simulations to sculpt home interiors that offer the best electromagnetic reception. Of course, this would not leave architects with much to do. The ultimate solution would be to simply build a big, open-plan interior with no obstructions or walls, says Cole. Indeed, welcome to modern architecture! But in a large, multi-room house or apartment, architects may not have that luxury and must instead balance the competing demands of walls and WiFi.

Still, hidden in Cole’s mathematical models are the shadowy outlines of an electromagnetically improved home. This realisation opens a vast and strange new world for architectural design or home makeovers &ndash one where signal propagation becomes as important a design parameter as natural light, good acoustics or fresh air. Developers might boast of WiFi efficiency ratings the same way they now tout sustainable design and luxury amenities. Architects will learn to build with electromagnetically porous materials in configurations that boost both wireless internet transmission and square footage. Designers are not yet prepared for this scenario, says curator Joseph Grima, co-founder of an . As Grima sees it, an entirely new class of design parameters has emerged and architects have not had time to adapt. For now, adding WiFi or Bluetooth to a home is nothing more than an aftermarket add-on, something the residents themselves will do through a chaotic assemblage of gadgets, antennae and routers.

Police radar intrusion

Yet the rise of the so-called smart home – where networked devices, communicating in real time, are peppered throughout the domestic environment – means that we may be surrounded by electromagnetic technologies 24 hours a day. This also means that we will be constantly monitored. The challenge for architects, says Grima, is twofold: they must learn to design with these devices in mind, but they must also learn to design so that residents can find refuge from them. This is an altogether novel conception of architectural privacy, well beyond the problem of noise coming through thin walls, or windows overlooking a neighbour’s back garden.

Grima highlights a . The suspect’s conviction was later challenged on the grounds that the radar – which operates on an electromagnetic frequency – had been used unconstitutionally to “enter” the suspect’s house, something that should have required a search warrant. This case raises more than just legal questions: if architects can design a home for visual privacy against voyeurs, why can’t they do the same for electromagnetic privacy against police radar or even simply to prevent neighbours from piggybacking on your WiFi?

Space Caviar has also experimented with homes that shield their occupants from these new intrusions. The – is a project Space Caviar debuted at the 2015 international furniture show in Milan (see top picture). “Does your home have an airplane mode?” the project asks. The RAM House was inspired by the realisation that the electromagnetic spectrum includes light, and that architects have always thought of light, visibility and privacy as something they are responsible for factoring into their designs. WiFi and radar are simply different frequencies of the same spectrum, says Grima. Architects ought to be just as engaged with them.

Electromagnetic privacy

“The RAM house was an attempt to interrogate the role and function of the wall, beyond its structural purpose, in order to extend its creation of privacy,” says Grima. “We wanted to give the inhabitants of the house an ability to decide how and when they want to attain privacy, including non-visual aspects like WiFi and radar.”

Space Caviar refers to this as “selective electromagnetic autonomy”. But unlike the all-or-nothing paranoia of the Faraday cage apartment in San Francisco, the RAM house offered a more thoughtful compromise: some rooms would be entirely sealed from electromagnetic penetration, others would be left open – like the WiFi equivalent of a screened-in porch.

As Cole’s modelling exercises made clear, architecture is already engaged with these phenomena, albeit unwittingly and more by accident than well-considered design. A badly placed wall or a well-placed window can have profound effects on your ability to use wireless internet or to make a mobile phone call.

Designing to accommodate these signals suggests that another revolution in architecture is on its way, giving physical shape to invisible forces and fundamentally rethinking the implications of our built environment. We might well look back on these days of randomly placed routers and frustratingly dropped signals with disbelief, as if architects had not yet realised how to design corridors to get from A to B or to arrange layouts for maximum sunlight.