AR ARCHITECTURE: TOWARDS A NEW AESTHETIC PROTOCOL
In addition to AR’s capacity to transform the design and experience of cities, its impact on architecture will be equally as significant. It has already had a sizeable influence on the construction and engineering industries, with applications such as GAMMA AR offering a safer and more efficient building environment for construction workers. Although a clear architectural style has yet to emerge from AR applications, new paradigms in architecture have historically been catalyzed by technological advances. This can be seen from the impact of reinforced concrete upon modernism’s ideologies, as expressed in Le Corbusier’s Five Points of New Architecture, to the automobile-triggered urban sprawl, which informed the postmodern lexicon of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas, and more recently in the undulating swirls of Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry’s parametric design, which found its voice through 3D modeling.

What aesthetic considerations might concern AR architecture? In a prescient essay from 2005 titled The Poetics of Augmented Space, writer, artist, and researcher Lev Manovich argues that the aesthetic design challenge of augmented architecture is not a particularly new one. AR buildings are essentially a pastiche: their facades will act as data layers upon which many other buildings and narratives are superimposed. Manovich takes the extreme “brandscaping” example of the OMA / Rem Koolhaas’ Prada store in New York from 2002, which featured gigantic monitors that advertised both the products on sale alongside data that forms Prada’s marketing decisions – effectively unveiling the operating logic of the company. Manovich argues that the electronic screen surface does not need to default as an extra layer of advertising; it can have a potent political and social function if cultural actors including architects “consider the ‘invisible’ space of electronic data flows as substance, rather than just as void.”

When designing augmented architecture – which is to say buildings that exist across both physical and digital environments – new material conditions will need to be taken into account. For instance, glass and other transparent building materials routinely throw off geospatial sensors, and harsh glares from reflective surfaces are not conducive to the camera interface of many AR tools. The future aesthetic of AR architecture will run counter to the modern glass towers that have come to dominate global cities—which, in addition to being an oppressive, homogeneous building typology, are unsustainable for both their energy consumption and the threat they pose to local ecologies.

AR architecture would be well suited to higher degrees of localization, wherein the building becomes a canvas for local, site-specific design interventions. As Manovich suggests, these buildings could also become signifiers of the technological processes they facilitate—for instance, a building that’s become a popular pinned location for AR content within a city could feature an indicator of its augmented application on its physical facade, akin to a high-score chart on a video game’s loading screen. By encouraging localization in both its material presence in the physical world and the mediated interactions it enables in digital space, AR architecture has the capacity to become a more accessible design protocol that expresses localized architectural styles, its own interactivity, and its future applications.

The Italian design collective Superstudio’s speculative project Continuous Monument (1965) serves as a welcome warning here. As a tongue-in-cheek critique of a homogenized global architecture, the project also meditated on the ambivalent relationship between nature and architecture, and the increasingly blurred boundaries between humans and technology. It asks, how do these changing ideas of architecture, urbanism, and (virtual) space change us, their users, in turn? As a type of architecture that is poised between physical and digital spaces, and that offers both agency and possibility in both realms, AR architecture will influence the material and spatial qualities of IRL architecture while expanding the possibilities of the discipline.

THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF ARCHITECTURE
Visionary architects have a tradition of imagining the cities of the future. Broadacre City by Frank Lloyd Wright, Highrise City by Hilberseimer, Radiant City by Le Corbusier, and Supersurface by Superstudio are paradigmatic examples of how our ways of living are shaped by the spatial configuration of our environment. In a world where AR is ubiquitous, spatial design will be practiced and broadcasted by anybody so inclined. Architecture will merge with filmmaking, game design, and programming to become an experiential form of new media. Users will adapt the city to their needs instead of adapting themselves to the city. Architects, in turn, will become mediators between the physical and digital realms.

URBAN HYPER-CUSTOMIZATION
Personal interactions in the virtual realm in Web 1 and Web 2 challenged the role of public spaces as the main catalyzers of social exchange. In contrast to exclusively digital social spheres, the augmented city will allow the creation of site-specific, custom, shared experiences that will enhance the interactions between users and their surroundings. Location-based AR entertainment such as games, events, and movies will be customized to respond to geo-specific real-world locations, reshaping the mixed-reality urban environment as an active part of social life.

EVER-EVOLVING ENVIRONMENTS
In Learning From Las Vegas, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi defined ‘decorated sheds’ as places where ornament was independent from the spatial and structural aspects of a building. Likewise, the augmented city could be reduced to a canvas to be populated with digital projections that are unrelated to its physical space. However, AR does not only add, but also allows to distort or modify three-dimensional information extracted from physical environments. Architecture will no longer be about construction, but about spatial modification. While buildings will continue to be static and passive, the augmented built environment will be a fluid and ever-evolving space.

MACHINE-READABLE MATERIALS
Augmented reality technologies require both a geometric and semantic understanding of reality in order to transpose information across the physical and digital worlds. However, certain material properties like reflectiveness and transparency are not easily interpreted by sensors and cameras. If the medium through which architecture is perceived affects the possibilities of architectural output, augmented space will inevitably develop a new aesthetic. Just as the car changed the symbolic expression of architecture to be read and understood at a higher speed, the ubiquity of AR will dictate the choice of building materials for the city to be readable and understandable for humans and machines alike.

GEO-SEMANTIC MIRROR OF REALITY
The contemporary city is more than its physical layer; it is a collage of data, reviews, and other information, yet the physical world as we know it shows only one of these many layers. The development and rapid improvement of global localization technologies allow, for the first time, these additional information layers to be visualized, analyzed, and experienced spatially. As a result, the augmented city will require a continually updated mapping of the ever-changing physical world. With the mass introduction of Virtual Positioning Systems (VPS) technologies within wearable AR headsets, the very act of perceiving the world will be a remapping of it. The experience of the augmented world and the mapping of the physical world will occur simultaneously, creating an unprecedented equivalency between production and consumption.

LOCATION-BASED DIGITAL PROTOCOLS
Architects and urban planners have traditionally used zoning as a method to define, shape, and regulate the urban environment. In the augmented city, these regulations will be dictated and implemented digitally. For instance, geo-fencing sets virtual boundaries around geographical locations, triggering certain machine behaviors in particular physical areas. In augmented urbanism, regulating and planning will progressively shift from governments to a broader range of stakeholders with digital agency, including tech companies and developers. The future augmented city will not be defined by drawings and regulations but through geo-specific digital protocols.

The introduction of augmented reality into architecture and urbanism will fundamentally alter the ways in which we design and experience cities. Through its integration of the digital and physical realms, this technology opens up new opportunities for collaborative and creative urban design protocols, while promoting a deeper understanding of the influence that a city’s past wields upon its future. As an extra “sensing layer” for the urban commons, AR also raises important questions around the ownership and privatization of virtual space. While these questions are yet to be answered, it’s clear that augmented urbanism will offer new paradigms for an ever-evolving, location-specific, and collaborative approach to urbanism and architecture. The augmented city of the future is coming; it’s up to us, its users, to make its vast creative, cultural, and political potentials a reality.